Hildegard Press
is for the collection and distribution of printed matter concerned with the periphery, the marginal, and the outside, in order to make the edge the centre of focus.
The press draws inspiration from the 12th century mystical nun Hildegard von Bingen, who produced botanical works, music, epiphanic visions, as well as inventing languages and writing esoteric philosophy. Hildegard Press aims to publish reflections on outsider or mystical practices, archival texts, as well as providing space for artists and writers to produce publications that fall outside the scope of their professional practice. Attending to fringe and experimental ideas, the printed matter produced attempts to locate the edges of things from the outside and reveal invisible boundaries and re-imagined spaces.
DICTIONARY: Of Terms Relating to the Edges, Divisions, Boundaries, and Borders of Things, Etc.
The first publication in the Hildegard Press series is a dictionary that establishes the definitions and etymologies of terms related to edges, divisions, boundaries, and borders. The dictionary seeks to outline the language used to define where one thing ends and another thing begins. A web of “See also:” referents link the terms to each other in order to produce a network of language that is commonly used to divide objects, worlds, political entities, metaphysical subjects, and bodies.
Hildegard Press 01, 2023 | perfect bound, 5x7”, digital print, 116 pp.
GEOMANCY: A Handbook of Practice and Interpretation
Geomancy is an ancient form of divination that is practiced by making a series of random marks that are then counted into sets of odd or even sequences. Following a binary logic, the odd or even collections result in a possible sixteen figures that can be used for interpretation. The divinatory reading applies a process of mathematical recursion to these figures in order to arrive at a final answer to the query. Drawing on a range of historical sources, this handbook covers the general principles of the geomantic method, its mythological origin, the interpretation of the figures, and provides a blank “shield” for conducting your own geomantic reading.
Hildegard Press 02, 2023 | saddle stitch, 5x7”, digital print, 24 pp.
EMMA KUNZ: The Polarized Calendula Blooms
In 1953, the Swiss mystic, healer, and artist Emma Kunz conducted an experiment on calendula flowers growing in her medicinal garden. With the aid of a pendulum she applied a process she termed “polarization” whereby the form of the flowers were altered in order to produce additional blooms following a numerical sequence. This publication explores Kunz’s practice and intentions, the process of polarization, number symbolism, and the contextual implications of the era. An appendix provides a summary of historical and medicinal uses of the calendula flower.
Hildegard Press 03, 2023 | saddle stitch, 5x7”, digital print, 28 pp.
WARNINGS: Kevin Romaniuk
In WARNINGS, Vancouver based artist Kevin Romaniuk draws from his vast photographic collection to explore a variety of sinister warning signs: painted placards, graffiti, tattoos, strange locations, and abandoned artifacts. These found images indicate a threshold, one that when crossed, might lead towards impending danger, violence, stringent ideology, or obliteration. Interspersed with images of cataclysmic natural disasters, the pages of WARNINGS foretell an ominous future, while also revealing a freedom afforded to those who occupy the fringes of society during these end times.
Kevin Romaniuk's work explores histories of counter-culture, the occult, stoner mysticism, and outsider knowledge. In addition to his visual practice, Romaniuk also collaboratively runs B.C HYDRA, the ASL, and Rub out the Scum (R.O.T.S), groups dedicated to the promotion and dissemination of rock and roll, freedom of thought, and the wasted.
Hildegard Press 04, 2023 | saddle stitch, 5x7”, digital print, 28 pp.
NOTES ON THE MINOR CHARACTER: Bopha Chhay
In NOTES ON THE MINOR CHARACTER Bopha Chhay meditates on "the minor" - those secondary characters or objects that populate the background and seemingly only serve to support or surround the area of focus. Through a series of fragments we encounter the minor characters from paintings and novels; the minor anecdotes appended to the overarching ideology of state-hood; and the minor details, usually overlooked, that can become a great revealer of falsehood. Ranging from Bruegel The Elder to Jane Eyre, Y-Dang Troeung to Dostoevsky, we see 'the minor' played out in multiple ways out of the corner of our eye. Here Chhay proposes 'the minor' to be that which quietly disrupts the main narrative, and as we re-orient our focus to the outskirts we are given the opportunity to think through a different set of stories: the fan fictions, the non-player characters, and the un-heroic gestures.
Bopha Chhay is a writer, arts worker, and curator of contemporary art. Her research and writing interests are guided by transnational and diasporic histories, collective practice, artistic labour, and artists’ publishing practices. She grew up in New Zealand, and lives and works in Vancouver, Canada.
Hildegard Press 05, 2024 | saddle stitch, 5x7”, digital print, 22 pp.
PRESCRIPTIONS: A Collection for Many Evils of the Body and the Mind, Also for Witchcraft
PRESCRIPTIONS is a transcription of a handwritten manuscript, dated to approximately 1650, containing a wide range of medicinal and magical remedies. Currently housed in the Cornell University Witchcraft Collection, it is assumed this practical handbook was a reference for healing, midwifery, and other medical/magical advice. Recipes and instruction cover various methods of purging, ointments for swellings, fevers, and pain reduction, lotions for venereal disease, advice for childbirth, and dilemmas such as “worms in the ear.” Accompanying these medicinal prescriptions are a series of magical prescriptions: charms, rituals, and spells recorded to fortify the ailing body, induce amorous desire, or seek revenge.
With its mix of Latin words, Early Modern English parlance, colloquial plant names, apothecary weights, and archaic medical terms, the recipes can at first appear opaque, but with sustained engagement one can begin to decipher the logics and structures within the writer(s)' shorthand. The original manuscript, in having its own detailed glossary, index, and citations, exhibits a meticulous cataloging of knowledge and resources, and reveals an earnest desire to hold onto the integrity and sanctity of the body in the face of 'many evils.'
The transcription is accompanied by a glossary of terms, an explanation of the various apothecary measurements used, and expanded citations of the medicinal/magical treatises that were abbreviated within the original text.
Hildegard Press 06, 2024 | perfect bound, 5x7”, digital print, 194 pp.
BODYBUILDER: Derek Coulombe
In BODYBUILDER, Derek Coulombe forms an elliptical correspondence between his own experience of Tourette’s Syndrome and Umberto Boccioni’s futurist sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. In this hybrid genre work of fabulist criticism Boccioni's sculpture becomes an obsessively deconstructed central character through which Coulombe reflects on the inherently repetitive, scatological, and convulsively queer properties of his own Tourettic situation.
Tourette’s Syndrome (a movement disorder that causes involuntary tics, convulsions, movements, and utterances) causes a body to assume specific physical shapes in the world without the body having meant to do so, and in this way, produces a scenario where the affected body is both assuming postures as well as watching these postures being enacted from a remove. This forced, partial removal creates a unique situation where Coulombe can view his body as an external object—as a series of surfaces and volumes—as something more like a sculpture or a painting. From this specifically disordered framework, Coulombe takes Unique Forms of Continuity in Space as a kind of malleable proxy where the sculpture becomes a figurative hub for an exploration of disabled embodiment and movement through the production of increasingly aberrant fictive vignettes.
Derek Coulombe is based in Toronto where he writes poetry and prose about embodiment, artworks, speculative physicality, and the relationships between materiality, bodies, and critical disability. In 2022-2023 he was the Chester Dale Interdisciplinary Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, during which time he wrote BODYBUILDER.
Hildegard Press 07, 2024 | perfect bound, 5x7”, digital print, 84 pp.
AGITATE! AGITATE! AGITATE!: Cj Reay
In AGITATE! AGITATE! AGITATE! Cj Reay of Black Lodge Press reflects upon their relationship to DIY print culture, zines, and the politics of art production. Reay lays out a history of DIY print and the people's press: from chapbooks produced during the French revolution to the zines made in response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, while outlining their own personal engagement with reading, music, and art that agitates, angers, and incites action. For Cj Reay, growing up in rural Northern England, the inherently anti-capitalist nature of DIY culture provided a connection to radical working class movements and the politics of anarchy: 'living breathing movements of resistance and joy and complexity and disappointment and boundless optimism.' Co-published with Black Lodge Press, AGITATE! AGITATE! AGITATE! is a zine about the beauty and radical power of creating art without permission.
Cj Reay is an artist based in Yorkshire, UK. For the past 10 years he has run Black Lodge Press–a publishing press and print project combining punk zines, risograph printing and radical politics.
Hildegard Press 08, 2024 | saddle stitch, 5x7”, digital print, 20 pp., plus insert
百姓 A HUNDRED SURNAMES: On reading Amino Yoshihiko and Marxist historical praxis
Steff Huì Cí Ling
While learning Japanese, Steff Huì Cí Ling was advised to read about subjects she was already interested in, while doing this, she found a list of Japanese Marxists on Wikipedia and began with Amino Yoshihiko and his book Rethinking Japanese History. Amino's book, and Ling's subsequent concerns, hinges around the translation of the term hyakushō from its Chinese characters: 百姓. While the term literally means "a hundred surnames," it has commonly been translated as "farmers," and in the context of Japan, refers to the (seemingly) fundamental practice of farming rice. Ling walks us through Amino’s idea that this mistranslation has reinforced a feudal, hierarchical structure to Japanese society, rather than show a Japan that has always been populated by the hyakushō as "common people," representing a broad spectrum of jobs across social classes, who "were and are doing a lot of different things in order to get by." In 百姓 A HUNDRED SURNAMES, Steff Huì Cí Ling explores translation, Marxism, film and poetry, and the discipline and pitfalls of learning another language.
Steff Huì Cí Ling 林惠慈 is a cultural worker, labour researcher, and occasional critic and film programmer living as a guest on the unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ / Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations.
Hildegard Press 09, 2024 | saddle stitch, 5x7”, digital print, 28 pp.
Hildegard Press is an artist publishing project by Lyndl Hall
This project was supported by the
Canada Council for the Arts and the
Alberta Foundation for the Arts
