Artist Books

My artist books use my printed imagery in novel ways, that give me the chance to present my prints in a hand-held manner. This format offers me the chance to experiment and explore the print as an object, the print as a page, as a single unit and a spread, relating to adjacent images. My books display my prints in a “readable” way, as I create permutations of my letter forms seen page by page or as an extended, complete image.

By removing segments of my images, the book format provides a way to see through multiple pages, heightening the viewer’s preview and recollection experiences. It also expands upon my use of different surfaces, enable me to use transparency and to accentuate specific forms.

I have thrived on the playful quality of my making my books, creating tactile, interactive objects that use aspects of my prints in new, and quite different directions.

Overtime, my books have evolved in their binding styles and in the inclusion of text. I have also welcomed a collaborative partner, Shannon Quinn, a Canadian poet, in several of my book projects. We have created two chapbooks together thus far, An Orthodox Strain of Light in 2021 and M/Otherworld in 2025. and having the amazing opportunity to work with her compelling prose. Her work is forceful, impactful and moving and provided me, especially in M/Otherworld with the challenge of responding to her words through their meaning, innuendos and implications.

M/Otherworld

A Chapbook by Shannon Quinn and Merrill Shatzman

M/Otherworld is a tapestry woven from my mother’s difficult life experiences, her resilience and The Otherworld, as understood by my family’s Irish heritage. This chapbook is a love letter to my mother, a woman I have had a challenging relationship with at times but who now in her 90th year has gentled in a way I could have never imagined. In writing this project I’ve had the opportunity to see her with new eyes, and am amazed by all the things I have never held space for. This includes our shared diagnosis of bipolar disorder, her own history of being abandoned in Canada at the age of 14 and the coping mechanisms she was forced to adopt that she later become unable to surrender. I have a much stronger understanding of the sacrifices she had to make in the 1950’s as a young Catholic woman who would become mother to six children. This is not to say she wasn’t a difficult woman at times but I now have context and a greater understanding for how she carried trauma.

The Otherworld, in Ireland, is a place adjacent to our world, unseen but porous. It holds ancestors along with pagan rites that were banished from Ireland under Catholicism. The Otherworld also holds the memory of the earth itself. The battles that have been fought, the blood that has been spilled and the knowledge of how we have fundamentally stopped listening and relinquished our joint roles of stewardship toward maintaining land free from the human instinct to dominate it.

M/Otherworld explores the boundaries and shapes of both the Otherworld and my mother’s own world. The creation of this text has been similar to going beck in time. I feel like I have had the chance to meet my mother before she married and had children. I’ve had the opportunity to contemplate who she was and what her hopes and desires were. As I wrote the text for this piece, I came to see that a sort of magic and memory can travel between these worlds. This chapbook asks to celebrate this interconnection.

Shannon Quinn

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Shapes of Ginza

I love going to Japan! I find it the most visually dynamic place I have ever visited, for in all aspects of life design and beauty are considered a priority. Even the manholes are well designed. It is also a country that women can travel safely on their own. My enthusiasm for going to Japan has inspired both of my adult children to visit as well. I am planning my third trip, once I age out of being a member of the sandwich generation and can stay for a longer time, venturing out into the countryside this time.

I am on a continual search for shape and pattern. In 2017, I had the opportunity to spend a week in Tokyo to do such a thing, concentrating on the design, shape, forms and patterns found on sections of architectural structures and their facades. All of my subjects were located in the Ginza district of Tokyo, chosen because of its innovative architecture, unique design and attention to detail. The geometric shapes and pattern become the primary focus of my image choices. The inclusion of decorative patterning, surface design, sections of logos and /or distorted lines and patterns found in reflective areas of the curtain wall architecture were paramount to the development of my ideas. The architectural integrity of each image was not my primary consideration, since I depicted each building from a close-up point of view.

Each section of the book is identified by the shape it has in common. Its commercial identification, if recognized, is not shown on purpose.

The woodblocks in this book were used in a number of other projects, including several animations, and prints. After planning the sections, their folds and pages I put the project away, without binding it. I rediscovered the pages in January 2025 and felt it was finally time to bind and create a cover honoring the places I love to visit.