Moyra Davey & Lisa Robertson
Sara Hutchinson’s Hand
2022

Offset lithograph on acid-free vellum
35.56 cm x 45.72 cm (unfolded)
Numbered edition of 100

Please note the edition comes unframed. Order a framed Quarto Series print here until December 16, 2022.

Sara Hutchinson’s Hand is a selective transcription from the notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Though the poet permitted few others to open these deeply personal volumes, Sara Hutchinson, STC’s beloved, sometimes copied into them passages or pages from other texts for his reference. He may have requested that she do so, as she at times wrote out his poems for intimate circulation. In rare instances in her entries, she added to or supplemented the cited texts. Here, the index from a botanical handbook of common British plants and a fragment from the sermons of Jeremy Taylor, the seventeenth-century religious writer, receive Sara’s augmentations. The artists present only Sara’s additions to her transcriptions, from December 1800, retaining the punctuation, passage numbers, and foliation numbers as added in her turn by the notebooks’ editor and annotator Kathleen Coburn. This work is a negative image of Coleridge’s notebooks, containing none of his words, only the thinking of the two women, with the addition of Davey and Robertson’s own marks.

Moyra Davey is an artist and writer living in New York.

Lisa Robertson is a poet living in France.

Design by Stephan Garneau. Photograph by Kathleen Coburn.