Ciel Rodriguez

“I don’t tell you enough,” he wrote to me} is a work from my on-going series “Envelopes.” While conducting research at libraries and archives, I am always drawn to the handwritten letters and journals I come across – the memory of a person’s hand transferred and left behind. Inspiring a series, I pair images of envelopes from my personal correspondence with bits of text pulled from letters written between loved ones. The act of rereading old letters feels like a way to remember someone, someone that does not live nearby or is no longer with us. Using the technique of letterpress printing, it felt appropriate to handset these fragments of text (as I ambiguously transfer them from their larger context) letter by letter in metal type and re-transcribe them in graphite ink back down onto paper once again.

Ciel Rodriguez is a letterpress printer, papermaker, and bookbinder from Atlanta, GA. She completed her BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with an emphasis in Book Arts and a minor in analogue Photography in 2018. She received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Georgia in Printmaking and Book Arts, as well as Museum Studies in 2021. While at UGA, Rodriguez was awarded the Wilson Center Graduate Research Grant and was a Graduate Assistant for Printmaking. She currently works at the Lyndon House Arts Center as their studio coordinator in Athens, Georgia. From large prints and handmade paper works to artists’ books, her artistic practice focuses on enveloping her viewers and readers in quiet expanses, evoking states of mind or states of remembrance.