Jen Bervin

Jen Bervin

Art, Installations, Poetry & Artist Books

  • Bervin Content Measure

    Burned journals, 1992–2012, after Susan Hiller (2023)

    Measure
  • Contents TheSilkPoems

    Silk, as a material, is compatible with body tissues; our immune system accepts it on surfaces as sensitive as the human brain. In conjunction with Tufts University’s Silk Lab’s cutting edge research on liquefied silk, Jen Bervin wrote a poem fabricated nanoscale in the form of a silk biosensor.

    Silk Poems
  • Content Concordance

    Dickinson called the word “no” the “wildest word we consign to language" yet editors omitted it from the concordance of her poems. This artist book is an addendum created as a textual mend to the concordance.

    Concordance Omission
  • Content Bervin The Sea 01

    The Sea, a poetry / artist book by Jen Bervin, enmeshes poems within the text of John Van Dyke’s The Opal Sea: Continued Studies in Impressions and Appearances (1906).

    The Sea
  • Shift Book Content

    Published for the first survey exhibition of artist and poet Jen Bervin, curated by Kendra Paitz, Shift Rotate Reflect features 23 individual and collaborative projects demonstrating the range of her interdisciplinary research, including the legacies of women artists and writers, relationships between text and textiles, and abstractions of language and landscape.


    Jen Bervin: Shift Rotate Reflect Book
  • Contents River Mirror Delta

    In Jen Bervin’s large-scale sculptural installation River an intricate model of the Mississippi River in silver sequins is inverted, mapped from a geocentric perspective (from inside the earth’s interior looking up at the riverbed). It took twelve years to make: the same amount of time to sew each section of river that it would to walk the real one.

    River
  • Content 7 S

    7S, or Seven Silks, is an artist book edition by Jen Bervin released by Granary Books that elaborates upon the research and writings that inform Silk Poems—a long-form poem presented as a biosensor made from liquefied silk developed in collaboration with Tufts University’s Silk Lab.

    7S
  • Content Bervin On Weaving

    These short videos by Jen Bervin, based on Anni Alber's book On Weaving, explore "new terms in the vocabulary of tactile language.”

    On Weaving
  • Bervin Content F12

    A series of large-scale embroidered quilts, The Dickinson Composites depict the poet Emily Dickinson’s variant marks in her manuscripts that have been omitted in print. The subtext for Bervin's series is Emily Dickinson’s textual practice, one obscured by a century of editorial interventions.

    The Dickinson Composites Series
  • Contents GNTrade236

    The Gorgeous Nothings by Jen Bervin and Marta Werner is the first full-color facsimile trade book of Emily Dickinson's manuscripts.

    The Gorgeous Nothings Book
  • Contents Faireetdefaire

    Faire et défaire c’est travailler / Doing and undoing it’s working (2021) depicts the hands of three intergenerational family members writing, translating, erasing, and rewriting this endlessly applicable French expression.

    Faire et dèfaire
  • Content Su Hui

    Su Hui’s Picture of the Turning Sphere (2016–2020) is a collaboration by poet and visual artist Jen Bervin and filmmaker Charlotte Lagarde. The multi-channel video and textile installation, self-described as a “feminist listening room,” focuses on Chinese poet Su Hui and her 4th-century reversible poem, “Xuanji tu” (Picture of the Turning Sphere). Structured on an astronomical gauge and stitched in five colors, the poem was written in a 29 x 29-character grid and can be read in many directions to yield almost 8,000 possible interpretations. This collaboration produced by Violet du Feng focuses on contemporary Chinese women's interdisciplinary perspectives on this embroidered poem.

    Su Hui’s Picture of the Turning Sphere
  • Contents Silk Poems Book

    "This beautiful multi-disciplinary text becomes a meditation on desire and embodiment, on cultural and personal transformation, on the genetic coding of language and the enduring connection of poetic practice to other forms of making."  —Elizabeth Willis

    Silk Poems Book
  • Jen Bervin, Silk Line

    In Jen Bervin's performative drawing Silk Line, she used a white grease pencil on glass to draw forms based on the filament pattern the silkworm makes in creating its cocoon.

    Silk Line
  • Content Desert Install

    The entangled poems in The Desert surface through a subtractive writing process and an additive textile process of stitching selectively through a facsimile of John Van Dyke’s The Desert (1901).

    The Desert
  • Jen Bervin The Dickinson Composites

    This artist book edition from Granary Books focuses on The Dickinson Composites, Jen Bervin's series of large scale embroideries on the poet Emily Dickinson's variant marks.

    The Dickinson Composites Edition
  • Contents GNEdition

    The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson's Envelope-Poems by Jen Bervin and Marta Werner is a limited-edition artist book based on Dickinson's late compositions on envelopes.

    The Gorgeous Nothings Edition
  • Contents Gridspace

    Over the course of a month, Jen Bervin made a large weaving directly onto Gridspace’s iron fence in Brooklyn.

    Weaving at Gridspace
  • WORK DN GossenSheet1

    Inspired by the work of Anni Albers, who used the typewriter as a way to create new patterns for woven design, Jen Bervin made the typed studies in the edition Draft Notation following intensive time spent weaving advanced cloth structures on the loom.

    Draft Notation
  • Contents Cosmic Static

    Cosmic Static features a sonic installation by Fayen d'Evie and Jen Bervin, in connection with Bervin’s participation in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI Institute) artist-in-residence program. It experiments with the dynamics of 'cosmic eavesdropping', combining a repurposed sculptural radio telescope feed from one of SETI’s arrays with an ultrasonic projection of field recordings and stories of individuals dedicated to listening for extraterrestrial signals.

    Cosmic Static
  • Contents SilverBook

    A long spare poem a few years in the writing, typed on an Olympia de Luxe cursive typewriter. The silver cover stock paper is the same as that used as a substrate in the installation River.

    The Silver Book
  • Content Nbsp

    A cloud poem with intricate drawings, excisions, and typewritten text collaged on rice paper, created for web publication. The title comes from the HTML source code for a non-breaking space, which preserves a blank space between words and simultaneously prevents a line break.

    A Non Breaking Space
  • Jen Bervin, Nets (UDP 2014)

    A book created within a palimpsest of Shakespeare’s sonnets to yield crystalline and prescient new poems.

    Nets