Artist Member
Artist’s Muse
Demeter’s Dream
We Have Always Worked
Nancer Ballard
BIO
Nancer Ballard, is a writer, poet book artist, and practicing lawyer. Her work focuses on connections between art, science, literature, the human body, and community. Her artist books have been exhibited throughout New England and beyond, including the Boston Public Library, The Attleboro Arts Museum, Boston City Hall, and Brandeis University, and other venues. In 2016 she received the Beyond the Book Exhibition’s Judge’s Choice Award for her artist book: Surviving the Election, and in 2013 she received the Judge’s Merit of Distinction Award and the Boston Public Librarian’s Choice Award for her artist’s books on the 2013 Boston Marathon race and bombing tragedy. She is currently a Resident Scholar at Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center where she works on artist books and other projects related to women’s narratives, climate change, and the role of neurobiology in human experience. She is the founder of The Heroine’s Journey Project, a blog-workshop research project that creates, collects, analyzes, and reviews literature, art, film, and transforming life experiences of women and members of marginalized groups with a different narrative pattern than the journey articulated by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. https://heroinejourneys.com/
Ms. Ballard has an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and Literature from The Bennington College Writing Seminars, a J.D. from Northeastern University School of Law, and a Masters in Counseling from Goddard Graduate School for Social Change. She has been a resident scholar at Brandeis University and Wellesley College Centers for Women and has taught at Ithaca College and the Boston Center for Adult Education. Prior to that, she worked as a photojournalist and arts and film critic, in Ithaca, New York and Boston, Massachusetts.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
My interest in book arts began as an extension of my work as a photojournalist and writer. My passion for the form really took off after I ran the 2013 Boston Marathon on American Liver Foundation’s Run for Research team and found myself searching for ways to express the complex body, mind, and soul verbal and non-verbal impacts of the marathon, the bombing, and the aftermath which led me to create a series of artist’s books on the Boston Marathon. For the last decade, my artist book work has focused on the intersections of myth, history, literature, science, individual narrative experience, and geopolitical political events. I am particularly drawn to giving voice and/or form to marginalized experience, and I find artists’ books particularly well suited for exploring multiple perspectives, the passage of time, and paradigm shifts. I am endlessly enthused by the form’s possibilities for combining conceptual and emotional themes through complementary and/or competing text and visual narratives in two, three, four (or more) dimensions. For me, an artist book is a layered narrative that, at its best, evokes both verbal and non-verbal distinctly individual and universal truths.