Bored Wolves

In Santiago, Chile, at his drawing table in the evening, beneath raindrops cozily tapping the roof, selecting from his panoply of pens, grounding himself by touching fingertips to paper fibers, inhaling before getting devoutly down to his meaningful mark-making, Tomás Cisternas has for seasons both sought and shared solace through his comics.

Cisternas’ one-page comics, around which this collection was edited, are poetic puddles, distillations of great lakes as concise as they are expansive. Whether sedentary or ambulatory, these autobiographical scenes are paced to a roaming equal parts restless and romantic. Even when he’s hunched over a page at home, Cisternas is somewhere else: a hillside, a forest, on the shores of a small pond chock-full of Bashō’s frogs; on the shores of a potentially bottomless puddle; on the inverted three-quarter shores of a coastal cloudscape with its pearly capes and coves.

The ambulatory comics often begin in the Chilean capital, where Cisternas lives with his family, before drifting across the wildland-urban interface the artist benevolently trespasses on his way to the billboard-less balm of the countryside, with its amphibious encounters, sensory portals to formative childhood memories, and, within the context of a skinny country, enough night sky to make eye contact with the cosmos.

“From the moment I originally discovered them, I fell in love with Tomás’ comics. They are lonesome, joyous, plainspoken, infinite.”

—John Porcellino

“I appreciate the attention Tomás pays to the quieter moments—raindrops passing through a lamppost’s cone of light or slipping through a dense canopy of leaves; how his gorgeous linework evokes the very thing he is experiencing; and how his generous perspective opens the reader to the shades of beauty around us at all times.”

—Ellen O’Grady

Tomás Cisternas is a comics artist based in Santiago, Chile. He is the author of a collection of stories, Gafas; and, as Tomás C., the ongoing self-published comix zine «Gris verde», from which PUDDLES, the first collection of Cisternas’ work to be translated into English, was developed by Bored Wolves.

“The vessels I create are large; you need two hands to lift a bowl or a vase. They take up space, but they also contain a lot of space within themselves. Wide bowls and tall vases are capacious. You can feel it if you put your hand inside.”

The Edge of the Vessel at the Height of My Mouth gathers together twenty-five of artist Alicja Bielawska’s colored-pencil drawings of (jugs) (vases) (vessels) combined with self-reflective poetry and prose fragments about jugularity in her ceramics work—part of a constellated practice melding sculpture, installation, textiles, ceramics, and drawing.

With self-animating pairings of two to four vessels contoured and contouring, embraced and embracing, Bielawska explores variations of intersection, glancing/grazing, what-contains-what, and flatness rising into the sinuous shaping of volume, sometimes incorporating grids radically rippling.

Through haptic prose and poetry, she further enmeshes mediums and materials, as her eyes track the penciling hand across fibrous paper describing the same hand slick with wet clay, palming ceramic air, cupping a jugful of dandelion wine.

Nominated for the 2023 Polish Photographic Publication of the Year

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Beginning to look

I started to notice

the older I get

the more I notice

studying the reproductions

separating this from that

noticing the gestures

feeling the movements

of the joints—

Hands & Feet of Friends & Family is a weave of Helen Korpak’s photocollages and locket-sized literary captions recording closely observed familiar and familial gestures. Granular renderings tenderly taped, Korpak’s collages meld the touching and the wryly humorous, balancing throughout the vulnerability of artist and subjects bonded by essential fondness.

Designed and typeset with haptic craft by Samuli Saarinen.

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Helen Korpak is an art worker located in Helsinki, Finland. She photographs, writes about art, and is a founding member of the Kosminen collective.

Nominated for the 2023 Polish Photographic Publication of the Year

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There is a stretch where the road suddenly slopes and you have the sensation of sinking into a shadowy valley. Then come four bridges in a row, crossing canals and branches of the Mała Panew river.

Now that I think about it, the place of which I speak always had something of a fairy-tale quality to it. But this fairy tale would be grim, Germanic, set in a brooding forest through which flowed a dark river…

Anna Orłowska’s Warm Mother Cold Mother is a multigenerational Silesian tale told through photography, prose, and herbaria. The book is structured around Orłowska’s photographs of the mechanical guts of a century-old watermill—the family base for as long as anyone can remember—interwoven with vintage family photographs of farm activity, and threaded through with a deeply personal prose text probing notions of belonging, impermanence on the tender underside of industry, hereditary burdens, and soil-based remembrance.