AUTUMN HARVEST OF A CAT

New work by Alexandra Rozenman

A handmade collage book begun during a recent stay on Nantucket follows a mythical cat as it slips from one form into another.

During a recent stay of several weeks on Nantucket, Somerville-based artist and teacher Alexandra Rozenman began creating a new collage book titled Autumn Harvest of a Cat. The book is still a work in progress. Across its painted and assembled pages, a mythical cat travels through shifting landscapes and gradually refuses to remain only a cat. It becomes a bird, a fish, a horse, a shadow, a figure and something less easily named.

The transformations do not unfold like a conventional illustrated story. They arrive through visual echoes: a pointed ear becomes a wing; a long tail becomes a horizon or branch; a patterned body reappears as another animal. Watercolor skies, dark pools of ink, cut-paper silhouettes, handwriting and old library cards create a world that feels both newly invented and already remembered.

SELECTION, DISSECTION AND CONNECTION

The developing book grows naturally out of Rozenman’s established collage practice. On her website, she describes collage as a process of “selection-dissection-connection”: cutting into older drawings and watercolors, choosing fragments, recombining them and allowing the shapes to become new images and “untold stories.” That approach is vividly present here. Paper carrying one history is asked to perform another role; a discarded record becomes a body, a shoreline, a building or a moon.

Rozenman’s mixed-media work occupies the meeting point of paint, ink and paper. Art School 99, the Somerville school she founded and teaches at, describes her own studio practice as living precisely in that overlap. Her collage work has also formed a recognized part of her exhibition history, including a 2023 show titled Collages at Gallery 360 in Minneapolis.

A CREATURE WITH MANY LIVES

The cat is an ideal guide through this kind of visual world. Familiar but mysterious, domestic yet independent, it can sit quietly on one page and return several pages later with wings, hooves or an entirely altered body. In Autumn Harvest of a Cat, identity is not fixed. Each transformation seems to preserve a trace of the previous one, as though the creature is harvesting forms and memories while moving through the book.

The cat does not disappear when it becomes another species. It carries its earlier lives forward, one fragment at a time.

The atmosphere of Nantucket can be felt without the work becoming literal travel illustration. Blue washes suggest sea and weather. Gray forms resemble fog, rocks and distant shorelines. Yellow and orange passages bring warmth, harvest light and late-season sun. The island becomes less a mapped place than an atmosphere through which the cat can keep changing.

Rozenman is known for surreal, narrative art that brings together personal symbols, folklore, displacement and belonging. In this developing book, those concerns are being concentrated into an intimate object meant to be handled page by page. As the work takes shape, figures disappear into the fold, landscapes continue across facing pages, and small pieces of archival paper interrupt the painted surface with traces of other lives.

A POSSIBLE LIMITED EDITION

Autumn Harvest of a Cat has not yet been completed, and Rozenman has not decided whether she wishes to publish it. One possibility under discussion is a small, carefully produced limited edition for sale, designed to preserve as much as possible of the rich color, paper texture and intimate character of the handmade original.

At this stage, no publication decision has been made. Expressions of interest from readers and collectors would, however, help us understand whether an audience may exist for a future printed edition.