

| About Sylvia. Wallingford, PA: the Elm Press, 1996. Poems by Diane Ackerman ... [et al.] ; lithographs by Enid Mark. Lithograph copyright Enid Mark 1996 Wanting to Die is reprinted from Live or Die by Anne Sexton. Copyright Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. All rights reserved. |
Artists statement:
Imagine a film in which each frame is a page. Or a book in which each page is a frame, a slight but inexorable quantum unit removed from its preceding and subsequent pages. You are now thinking of a book in the manner in which Enid Mark approaches a book. Mark's books unspool like rolls of film, as if they were continuous planes across which information might be read in forward and back. But, like film, her books are carefully sequenced, directed from poem to poem by subtle links of meter or metaphor. In About Sylvia, a fissure emerges in a pane of glass, gradually shattering out of its frame in a violent explosion as the ten poems - each by a different poet touching on the life of Mark's college friend, Sylvia Plath - unfold through the text. Is this activity a form of illustration? The pairing of images and texts? The question seems irrelevant in this context, as Mark engages in practice more closely allied with illumination than illustration.
Mark's work is included in numerous rare book and print collections such as the collections of Cambridge University, London; Cornell University, New York; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Wash., D.C.; Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington; and the Library of Congress. She received her B.A. from Smith College, Northampton, Mass, and has also studied at West Chester University and Philadelphia College of Art. She has had solo exhibitions of her work at Yale University, Farnsworth Art Museum, Smith College Library, and Eric Makler Gallery in Philadelphia, among others. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at venues such as the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; The British Library, London, England; and Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. She has received Purchase Awards from Delaware Art Museum, Beaver College, and the University of Delaware.