Hardcover stab-bound book with screen-printed cloth covers and 32 mixed media pages with interactive elements, 9” x 12”, unique book, 2021, Available through Vamp & Tramp Booksellers

I’ve been journaling since I was a teenager and it has always helped me better understand myself and the world around me. This visual journal began in the summer of 2020 while my family & I were home during the first pandemic lockdown. The later entries were made in the spring of 2021 when I started teaching in person again. Each spread reflects a moment in time or an event in my life—the heightened anxiety of the early days of the pandemic, the vitriol of the presidential election, packing and moving my family into a new house, and bringing my mom home from the West Coast to live with us, and learning how to teach & breathe while wearing a mask. My journal practice is my most immediate mode of communication. It usually begins with an intense writing session on my typewriter. As I look for ways to visualize my writing, I begin a process of choosing what to do next, making each decision rapidly one after another in a kind of flow state. Choices about where to place an image, whether to cut a window into a page, which paint colors to use, how to incorporate text as image—each micro-decision is a response to the previous one. After a spread is finished, I feel a sense of relief—almost as if I’ve been heard—even if the spread is about something terrible like the Capitol Riot. I am totally immersed in the process while journaling, aware of what I’m making, but free from my tendency towards internal critique, feeling greater freedom to experiment and fully express myself in the process.

Pages from a 2019 travel journal based on a road trip from Orlando to Montreal.

Mixed media travel journal from a 2019 road trip from Orlando, FL, USA to Montreal, Canada by Rachel Simmons

Scenic Overlook, Rachel Simmons, 2019, unique artist’s book with sumi-e ink, tape transfers, drawing and collage on paper with photos by Lee Lines

This visual journal-style artist’s book is part of a collaborative project with geographer Lee Lines titled Visible Climate. As an interdisciplinary art and environmental studies effort, this project visualizes the impacts of climate change on our national parks through an investigation of vintage posters and postcards. The idea of a “scenic overlook” emerged during the development of tourism in the national parks; certainly the act of pulling one’s car over, taking a quick snapshot of a breathtaking vista, and then driving away to the next stop is a truly American way of experiencing nature. Like a fast food drive-in, we are able to conveniently consume a hassle-free, sanitized version of the wilderness without leaving the road. Early tourism images used photo-colorization techniques to provide a heightened and distorted version of nature to lure visitors to parks. Scenic Overlook asks the viewer to consider how we consume wilderness as tourists, how climate change is impacting these experiences in the parks, what will we lose as climate change slowly erases our idealized mental images of the past as we face the altered landscapes of the future.