EP 31:  The art of PETER NADIN has long unfolded across the residue of experience, the limitations and possibilities of knowing another, and the capacity for transformation. The Mark Series: Method and Manual – Art, Poetry, Farming, Ceramics, Film, 2003-2018, encapsulates these efforts through Nadin’s use of maxims, journal entries from a year on his farm, poetry, and essays. Instead of a world of non-sentient solitudes, with humans at the pinnacle, the texts in this book are enmeshed with the consciousness of other creatures.  Written as both a method and manual, the book chronicles Nadin’s understanding and portrayal of experience with accuracy.  There is the first mark – the impulse behind art and being that can be seen through the traces of experience and the cognitive constructions of that experience. The second mark captures the conditions into which one is thrown, and how those predicaments are perceived.  Transformation is central to the third mark; that is, how something becomes a transformed version of itself.  Abe the boar figures significantly here as an inhabitant of the farm, as well as a participant in the story between farmer and pig, myth, and culture.  At the heart of The Mark Series is a deep, lively entanglement that invites readers into the dispersal of histories across a land saturated with many realities.

Peter Nadin studied at Newcastle-upon-Tyne University in England from 1972-1976, and received the Max Beckmann Award from the Brooklyn Museum in 1976.  His works are included in many private and public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  He has had major exhibitions at the Yale Center for British Art (1992); the Wifredo Lam Center in Havana (2007), which traveled to Holguin, Pinar del Río, Matanzas, and Cienfuegos, Cuba; Gavin Brown Enterprise, New York (2011); The Horticultural Society of New York (2012); and the James Fuentes Gallery, New York (2019).  Among his books are Still Life (1983); Tide of Tongues (1991); The First Mark: Unlearning How to Make Art (2008;and Taxonomy Transplanted: Art, Language, Farming (2013).  He taught at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, 2006-2013.  The Mark Series: Method and Manual – Art, Poetry, Farming, Ceramics, Film, 2003-2018 is his third book with Edgewise Press.  He is an artist, poet, and farmer living and working in Greene County, New York State.

The Mark Series:  Method and Manual – Art, Poetry, Farming, Ceramics, Film, 2003-2018, by Peter Nadin, was published on the occasion of the artist’s exhibition at James Fuentes Gallery, April 29 - March 2019, New York.  It includes texts by Sean Akerman and Chris Murtha, and an interview with the artist.  It is the third book by Peter Nadin published by Edgewise, and to celebrate the occasion a three-volume slipcase has been created to include his previous two books, The First Mark: Unlearning How to Make Art (2006) and Taxonomy Transplanted:  Art, Language, Farming (2013).  The third volume, The Mark Series (2019), is 136 pages, with 24 color plates, sewn and printed in Italy.  It is available at Amazon.com and epinc@mindspring.com / edgewisepress.org   I.S.B.N.:  1-893207-44-7.  I.S.B.N.:  978-1-893207-44-8.  $15.00.  Special slipcase edition:  $50.00. 

First edition paperback, May 2019, pp. 136, sewn, bound and printed in Italy, with a two-color cover, a black and while photograph of the author on the frontispiece, and a portfolio of 24 color illustrations.

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