Kassadie Nieto Interns at Small Craft Advisory Press

From FSU Art BFA ’20 Kassadie Nieto:

“Small Craft Advisory Press (SCAP) is an artist book press located at FSU’s Facility for Arts Research. SCAP creates editions of artists books which focus heavily on collaboration. Since beginning my internship at SCAP in June, I have acquired endless new techniques for creating book editions and have improved my existing skills in this area. As a BFA focusing in printmaking and artists’ books, working at SCAP has given me a glimpse of what it is like to work in a print shop or book press.

Everyday is completely different at SCAP and there is always a new task to get done and a new skill to learn. From letterpress printing to binding, I participate in a variety of tasks to help produce these often nontraditional book forms. Because the book editions that SCAP creates often take years to finish, this internship has taught me how much work and time goes into creating book editions to this caliber. The tasks that go into creating these book editions are often tedious and repetitive. For example, I often will spend a whole day folding paper or glueing book spines. The repetitive nature of these tasks has taught me discipline and to become efficient and precise in my work. Additionally, it has been extremely rewarding to see the completion of small tasks slowly grow and transform into beautiful and complicated art objects.”

“A large portion of my time at SCAP has been spent working on an issue of SCAP’s ongoing project Oyster Boat. This is a project that epitomize SCAP’s focus on collaboration as each issue focuses on the work and ideas of an artist or writer or anyone who makes things. For Oyster Boat, SCAP asks this artist for a fragment or scrap of their practice, which we collaboratively turn into an artist book edition. A main goal of Oyster Boat is to be a quicker project, so I have been able to see this project from start to (almost) finish.

For this issue of Oyster Boat, we are working with the work of Christopher Kardambikis. In the spring, Chris came and talked to the advanced artist book class I was in and we designed the book collaboratively as a class. Since designing the book in class, I have been able to do most of the printing, folding, and binding of the book edition. It has been extremely rewarding to be able to work in this environment on a project that I helped to design and I look forward to seeing it completed.”