monsters and ghosts of saint paul
This piece was created as a spread for Curious City: In, Out, Above, Beyond Saint Paul, a cultural atlas of Saint Paul, MN. This book was imagined and produced by a geography class at Macalester College, 2019 - lead by Ashley Nepp
About the Project
Modern industry is changing the earth to such an extreme that our imprint on the planet will remain long after we are gone. This is the Anthropocene – the age of extinctions. These extinctions leave visible traces – haunted landscapes – that reveal the consequences of our actions on a small scale, mimicking the larger systems we cannot see. Monsters are the evils we have created, human inventions spiraling out of our control. Ghosts are traces of the past still lingering in our landscapes.
About the Process
This project began with a re-reading of The Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet for importation from their monsters and ghosts methodology for looking at the forces shaping our planet in the Anthropocene. Then I spent a while conducting casual interviews and taking pages of notes trying to get at bits and pieces of the hidden history of Saint Paul. I talked a lot with Dave Lanegran from Macalester and Patrick Coleman from the historical society, and they were able to point me in some directions to research further. From there I painstakingly narrowed down my research to only 15 stories that best fit with the monsters and ghosts methodology, and wrote up some brief summaries for each of them. I used Coolors.com to pick a color scheme, ArcMap to create my background map, and Adobe Fonts to download typefaces. I drew pictures and scanned them in, using photoshop first and then adding them to my final illustrator file. I did all the layout and graphics in illustrator.
I also did the cover for this book, which was a print I made using a linoleum block.
