Sue Carrie Drummond is a papermaker, printmaker, and book artist who is an associate professor of art and chair of the Art Department at Millsaps College in Jackson. Drummond was awarded the Artist’s Book Residency Grant at Women’s Studio Workshop in Kingston, New York in 2017 and has been an artist-in-residence at Sulfur Studios in Savannah, Georgia; the Kimmel Nelson Harding Center in Nebraska City, Nebraska; Penland School of Crafts near Asheville, North Carolina; and the Minnesota Center for Book Arts in Minneapolis. Her work is regularly featured in juried and curated exhibitions nationwide and is included in special collections at institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Library of Congress, and Harvard University. She also has pieces in the permanent collection of the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art in Washington and the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art in Laurel, Mississippi. Drummond earned her MFA in book arts and printmaking at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia in 2015 and her BA in studio art from Millsaps College in 2012.
Contributing writers were encouraged to pen texts using the style, voice, and format of their choice. The resulting suite of poetry, journalistic and critical prose, creative essays, and personal reflections offers diverse perspectives on the artists, their practices, and their lives.
A Note from the Curator
Catherine Simone Gray is a teacher and a writer of true stories of healing, pleasure, and liberation. In this piece of poetic prose titled i do, we do, you do, she reflects on the personal relationship she shares with artist Sue Carrie Drummond and the ways in which Drummond revealed how meaning is formed from the processes of making. Drummond is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans bookmaking, papermaking, textiles, printmaking, and installation. Her expansive contributions to the 2025 Mississippi Invitational literally litter the floors, crawl up the walls, and hang from the ceilings of the galleries to create fully immersive experiences.
Catherine Simone Gray on Sue Carrie Drummond
“i do, we do, you do”
i do
I write in my home next to a piece you made me six years ago that hangs on my studio wall. A placenta print. You made it from what we made—my son and I, a placenta; my partner and I, a human. A womb is a first home, wherever we call home from there. A placenta is the organ we grow in that home for nourishment and protection, a barrier from toxins. In the piece you created, the bottom layer was made by my doula, who pressed my placenta on paper on her kitchen counter, leaving an impression with the ink of my blood. The next layer is translucent paper you made, called abaca, I would learn years later. On the abaca you printed two red shapes that resemble hand-knit dishcloths, one much bigger, evoking a mother form in one corner and a baby in the other. Their end-threads dangle toward one another. Yes, umbilical. The top layer is plastic and printed with lines from Psalm 139: “My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.” Those words, while imprinted in my memory, feel less like home than they did six years ago.
The layers become embedded, inextricable. There is beauty in the combinations but sometimes there is visual confusion, and they look like one.
we do
We gather in your living room to paint our nails in colors like Forbidden Fruit and Take Me to Your Leader. We say texture and pattern words like thermal, velvet, cat eye, magnetic, power. And in your art studio at Millsaps College a few weeks later, we dip our fingers into water that’s being ground into abaca by a metal wheel. “This one will stink,” you caution, opening a bucket. “It’s organic after all. It’s been here awhile.” I smile to think that your art has a body odor. After, we rinse the slick paperstink off our fingers in a sink in a building that didn’t exist when we were students here together, writing articles for The Purple & White many homes ago. “The longer you beat it, the more transparent the paper becomes.” You hold up sheets to show me the translucency of one hour, three hours, five.
See how time gets collapsed in the layers. The puckering in the material evokes skin.
you do
You tell me, “I try to remind myself, when I’m not feeling so academic, that part of what I’ve spent years of my life doing is learning handcraft.” You know what flax from Asia does when you shred it and beat it by hand; you demonstrate how strong the paper is by tugging on each side as the longer fibers resist tearing. You know how to cut stencils by hand, so you know to miss the rugged edges the digital stencil is incapable of creating. You’ve handbound books, made flatlays and pop-ups, darned stitches and printed with lace. “I struggle with making one image,” you explain when we pass by a painting you started with threshold motifs. “I started creating this grid after, and this feels more like me.”
