It is difficult for a contemporary reader to conceive of machine-made paper as new technology, or of paper as a reincarnation of cloth, but in the poet Emily Dickinson’s lifetime—1830 to 1886, the embossed writing paper she used to compose poems and letters was quite literally cloth—highly-processed cotton and linen textile “rags” transformed by new papermaking technology into paper. As is often the case, the very small—the unseen fiber—connects to something larger just out of view. How many hands have touched this paper in all its forms—pulp, cloth, thread, plant, seed? What were the terms of those labors? What is a poem supported by? As the artist Vanessa German asks, "What is touching us back?" I want to question, make visible, and trace the local and global provenance and complex material history of Dickinson’s paper supports and surfaces.

Jen Bervin is a visual artist and poet whose multidisciplinary practice weaves together situated poetics and entangled relationships between text and textiles. Bervin’s conceptual, scientific, and literary investigations of material histories are attuned to the embodied, visual, and tactile aspects of language; these research-driven works frequently result from long-term collaborations with artists, scholars, and scientists. She is a 2025-2026 Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. https://www.jenbervin.com/