state of heaven is a collaborative edition by Indi Middleton and Bryce Olsen, produced for Plaza.

It carries itself with the logic and language of a print but takes the form of a satin pillow in baby blue. Each of the ten has been made by hand, marked by slight variation, and signed as part of a formal edition. This gesture is a nod and a wink toward the controlled world of traditional printmaking, where replication and consistency are the conditions of value. 

The title, state of heaven, plays ironically on the idea of perfection. Heaven, in this case, is a dream still being dreamt—a vision that understands its own disillusionment and embraces it anyway. To edition this type of work is already a contradiction: softness resists precision; fabric shifts; embroidery drifts; and thus no two are the same, despite their shared format. Middleton’s work frequently wrestles with these kinds of contradictions: between order and mess, language and material. Middleton’s approach is to embrace the imperfect, countering the expectation of resolution.

The pillow becomes a stage for this—poetic, awkward, deliberate. The square embroidery feels assertive; the halo, reverent or faintly sarcastic. The text, pressed onto satin through collagraphy, behaves more like a memory than a statement. Together, these elements produce an object that hovers between sincerity and parody, care and critique.