PAPER ROAD
by Nicole Lavelle

PAPER ROAD is a research narrative capturing the process of re-orienting oneself to a home-place. This book is the final document of a year-long research project conducted while Lavelle was a Graduate Fellow at the Headlands Center for the Arts. 


Lavelle starts at her family’s historic summer cabin in western Marin County and uses houses as vessels for situating her own located reality within broader California cultural contexts and land use histories. She constructs a non-linear narrative of fragments, recontextualizing found image and text from private and public archives and collections and providing annotations to frame an assembled story.


The book features 450 pages of annotated narrative, an introductory essay, a contextualizing conversation with archivist and independent scholar Rick Prelinger, and sections for exhaustive citations, indexing and bibliography.

Nicole Lavelle is an artist and designer whose work engages people, place, paper, language and landscape. Her research-driven, project-based practice yields experimental essays, visual narratives, and platforms for participation. Her work interacts broadly with vernacular media, place-based identity and private and public archives and collections. She employs methodologies from journalism, graphic design and social practice. She is an Affiliate Artist at Headlands Center for the Arts. She co-coordinates PLACE TALKS, a lecture series at the Prelinger Library in San Francisco, where she is Artist in Residence.