A Volcano Pilgrim in Exchange for Fire

Serena Perrone uses a variety of printmaking techniques in experimental ways—such as layering gouache monotype with screenprint and letterpress--to create prints that combine both poetry and text from quotidian sources such as email, with sublime images in beautifully constructed compositions. Perrone deconstructs and challenges assumptions her work might create, as well as that proposed by the texts and imagery she evokes. In A Volcano Pilgrim in Exchange for Fire, Perrone traces the last trip of Craig Arnold, a poet who journeyed internationally to visit and later write about active volcanoes in countries such as Italy, Peru, Columbia, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Mexico, and Japan. Arnold, who described himself as a "volcano pilgrim," kept an eponymous blog in which he described his travels. Juxtaposed against images of active volcanoes Arnold visited are bits of text culled from the writings he generated during the last twenty days of his life while hiking volcanoes as research for his next volume of poetry, Arnold disappeared and is presumed to have died in 2009 on the island of Kuchinoerabujima, Japan. It is assumed he died but it is not clear whether it was a suicide or if he succumbed to poisonous gases released at the summit of an active volcano. Perrone felt a deep connection with Arnold’s work, as well as an identification with his attraction to nature in all its sublime beauty and power. She writes of the relevance of Arnold’s project to her own work, "primarily, his thoughts on home and distance, the foreign and the familiar, and that longing that seemed ever present in his work…" In this work, Perrone creates a panorama in which the viewer feels the immense power and beauty of the volcanoes, which are rendered in dark blue indigo ink and overlaid with gouache monotype using a Takach etching press. Selections pulled from Arnold’s blog are printed in screenprint and white ink that seem to emanate from the volcanos themselves, making this work a powerful meditation on the power and danger and nature in all its sublime glory.