Anna Haglin: Unother I
The shiny emergency blankets of Unother I are covered in red crosses, each marking where the blanket was folded to neatly fit in a package. I used pigmented, heat-activitated foil to make each tiny cross. Heat stamping has been part of bookmaking since the medieval age, and came out of the tradition of leather tooling—the process of pressing gold text and designs onto book covers.
Emergency blankets are used to help the human body recover from shock. They are distributed to victims of natural disasters, or to refugees who land on foreign shores. The blankets in Unother I are resting on abject forms that move as though gasping for breath. As our climate changes, it becomes more and more likely that we might all be displaced by natural or humanitarian disaster. Thermal blankets are a small attempt to care for one another, regulating each other’s temperatures as the planet warms. If only we didn’t have to unfold the blankets at all.
—Anna Haglin
Free and open to the public
WhereMCBA Outlook Gallery
WhenJanuary 25, 2025–March 29, 2025
Viewable from the street (and from inside the shop during open hours)
Artist Anna Haglin uses language and material-play to explore communication and crisis. Her hometown, St. Peter, MN, is the historic site of treaties that devastated the Dakota people. St. Peter was also destroyed by a tornado when she was eleven. These events partly explain her interest in empathy, community, natural disaster, and how othered identities intersect with those experiences.
She spent fifteen years after high school moving between Massachusetts, California, New York, and Iowa. Along the way she gained formal training in bookbinding, printmaking, and papermaking–art forms that allow people to share information across continents and despite economic difference. This background informs her work in education at the Walker Art Center and gave her the necessary training to run a mobile, papermaking-education project called Paper Plains. When she isn’t teaching or making art, she loves to forage for mushrooms, swim in lakes, and cross-country ski.
Upcoming Exhibitions
