Art of the Book

These horizontally-suspended pages represent theunspoken yet deeply-remembered stories which can evolve over decades of partnership. Rising from shadow shades into clear openness, monoprint “illustrations” and burnt screen-printed “text” are illuminated as they reach into a permanent timelessness. This work was created during the last months of my late husband’s life, its intricacy and delicacy giving me meditative focus at a challenging time.

“The Real View Collection” is an archive operating within the historical framework of early 20th-century stereography. Stereographs consist of two nearly identical photographs or photomechanical prints, paired to create the illusion of a single three-dimensional image, “producing an appearance of reality which cheats the senses with its seeming truth”. Under the guise of “The Real View Company”, a fictional stereograph publisher, the Collection is presented as a “luxury box” containing multiple collections of views and an original early 20th-century stereoscope. The Real View Collection aims to hijack the experience of “exploring the world from the comfort of one’s armchair” by addressing contemporary geopolitical and sociopolitical issues across the globe. Our “collections of views” are inspired by the visual language of the companies at the time and mimic popular themes of stereography, connected to leisure, travel, history. In our work, the themes are infiltrated by contemporary images of war, destruction, loss, and social inequality. The first set, “25 Views of Eastern European Landscape,” documents the war-torn landscapes of Ukraine, exploring the profound ecological devastation alongside the human tragedy. Subsequent collections, including “25 Views of Modern American Housing” and “25 Views of Palestine and The Holy Lands,” examine the crisis of accessible housing in the United States and the ongoing devastation in the Gaza Strip, respectively. Today, the sheer volume of visual content in our daily lives has numbed us to the true essence of imagery. In our work, we utilize stereographs’ true potential – to empower viewers to truly see, not just glance. By engaging with a stereoscope, we escape our everyday distractions and step into the scene, where each second spent within its depths intensifies our awareness. This experience transforms looking into seeing, as our eyes navigate the solid surfaces and confront the raw realities embedded within the image.The work is made to evoke an early 20th century aesthetic, positioning the work as an artifact of the past while being critical of our contemporary practices, societies, and the human condition. Paradoxically in our work, the creation of the stereo effect using singular images, relies on a new, currently developed technology, which is called machine seeing. We employ open-source algorithms and tools developed for machine seeing to generate “depth maps” from 2D images. A depth map is a pixel based image with different tones from white to black, each signifying levels of depth. These depth maps are then used to manipulate perspective and restructure pixel relations on the original image, creating the “right eye view” and, ultimately, the illusion of three-dimensionality when viewed through the stereoscope. The stereographs are created using photopolymer intaglio plates, and the letterpress text is printed with laser engraved matrixes. The final stereographic image is a synthesis of the real and the “imagined” – a 3D reality existing in one’s relative perception, a mirage dwelling in the space of *metaxy*, the in-between.

Personal handwritten family letters of dear people separated from each other on two hemispheres collected by my mother, circa 1980-1990, (including the time of Martial Law in Poland: 13 December 1981 – 22 July 1983) woven into over five meters family tapestry memoir; a conscious way of transforming fibers to give a new life and a new way of being together after unexpected family separation and misplacement. The tapestry is purposefully hung on bamboo, a tree often recognized as a symbol of strength, flexibility and adaptation to the most difficult circumstances.

Statement about Vessel Book 7:

This small but mighty book is an experiment in material and book form. I wanted to play with the idea of books made from the earth, meaning clay and paper. The idea of a book that can’t necessarily be read also intrigues me. This little book in its round, endless form, plays with these concepts. It also takes a great deal of planning and having the vision fully formed before the book is even brought into being. Holes have to be measured and pre-punched when the clay is still wet in order for a successful binding after the covers are fired. With eight books in the series to date, I have made a small collection in this style with paper and clay melding together.

General Artist Statement:

“As an observer by nature, my work is motivated through imagining objects have memory. Historically, books have been used as memory tools to record personal stories, myths, practical instruction, business, or historical events. I like to explore what “memory tool” means and play with ideas of objects found in nature, much like how an archeologist or naturalist uncovers an artifact or identifies a new species. Is this object animal? Mineral? Man-made?

I make both books and non-books with this thought process. I like to tinker, play, and engineer new book structures that would not typically be considered a book. I push the boundaries of form and function through haptics and experimentation. Using materials like clay, wire, bones, metals, thread, foliage, bugs, and paper, I ground the work back to the real world that has a sense of the familiar, yet recontextualize it into something new.”

By changing the perspective, the materials, do we change the visceral experience of stored language, or even the absence of language, as in “Silences”?

As a visual artist who specialized in working with paper thin translucent porcelain, papers, fabrics, and found objects, and as a writer and psychotherapist who specializes in words and the negative space where there is an absence of words, I cherish the ability to fuse these disciplines into my own very personalized expression of book art.

“People I Know, People I Don’t Know” is a unique collaged artist’s book.  The images are collages created from magazine & book scraps (some older, some new) mounted on pages made from decorative paper and/or spray-painted painted pages from vintage books.  Text (by the artist) is in the form of picture captions on each page (There are many ways to be sublime in this world.  On days when he had no appointments, they went to the dog park in their pajamas.)  Covers are hand-cut and formed from several layers of Lotka paper, bound with a simple locked stitch binding (similar to Coptic).  The book presents portraits of some people who interest me.  I think I know some of them, others, maybe not.  They are making their way in this world, just like you and me.

Inspired by characters who claim agency amidst oppression and censorship, my goal was to capture the threatening aura of the public arena while alluding to the wondrous life pulsing in secret places and the hidden thoughts and acts that happen therein. To capture this feeling, the dark intaglio printed pages of the accordion book reads as a haunting scene of a school assembly devoid of people. Turning the pages, the viewer engages in a hunt for the action, but it seems to always be just out of view. Then, from backstage, a fantastical broom sweeps joyously through multiple spreads, seeming to dance as it flits up debris, offering a source for a visual motif that persists throughout the pages. The scale of the broom and its gestural composition let the reader lay claim to the agency of irreverent play in the dark behind the stage. The final page shows the windows with curtains, assuring th e reader that no one saw as they let themself be swept away.

The world of book and paper arts is a wonderful rabbit hole with so much to learn, explore and hybridize. I’ve enjoyed learning and teaching historical art techniques like paper marbling, paste paper and international binds that many folks would not recognize as a traditional “book”. I’ve found my artistic format: The artist’s book.

Red Line

Single signature, link stitch, acrylic paper marbling, linen thread, found red nylon belt with metal buckle rings, #1/1

Red Line is a conceptual artist’s book. It’s a reaction to the latest round of women’s healthcare and reproductive rights court challenges that American women must face and fight against. The book uses a stitched red line as a warning line, a point of no return, and a political metaphor. 

Years ago a friend was cleaning out her house and gave me this Newsweek World Culture Series from 1974. It sat in my bookshelf for many years unopened, and probably sat unopened on her bookshelf for many years before that. My original project was to make small, quick, spontaneous pieces with some of the pages.  But as I started selecting pages, I fell in love with the drama and artistry in the photos and illustrations. I knew they had to stay together and be rebound into a new life and share their beauty with a new audience.

Nanette Wylde learned to read script at a very early age from the pages of Babar’s famous adventures. Her affection for Babar and his family was deeply connected to her fascination with the handwritten words that told their stories.

As an adult, Wylde embodied a connection to elephants which included a nostalgic, familial longing imbued with an animal rights, conservation approach. With the help of more books she began to understand some of the challenges non-human sentient species such as elephants, experience, and their plight in competition with humans for territory, resources and the sanctity of dominion over their own lives in their own bodies in appropriate habitats.

Redacted Babar: ABC Free grapples with Wylde’s love of Brunhoff ’s characters and the recognition of their impact on young minds; and the current realities of the increasingly endangered and diminishing populations of African and Asian elephants.

flipbooks
and
cutting paper
combining the two
and then
extending the paper beyond the cover
adding a second
and then
a third book
making shapes out of multiple books
and then
adding paper strips
both straight
and very acute triangles
and then
adding more books
making bigger shapes
not always by connecting the books
and then
adding gatherings of tiny pieces of paper
made from
thousands of cuts
some making very small triangles
others very long
and then
moving them off the pedestal
and onto the wall
and then
the ceiling
and then
by making many the same
they fill a wall
or
a room

One within another
or is it singular?
Stretch limits.
Abandon form.
Cut, heal—
cut again.
To each its own.
Metamorphose.

It is the same.
Is it the same?
Push the horizon.
Learn, forget—
learn again.
Transform.

I am different.
I am the same.
I am different-same.

For this book art piece, I began by combining two different images and stretching them until they blurred into unrecognizable forms. This distorted composition became the basis for the pattern I created. Next, I sliced the pattern into one hundred fifty strips and adhered them to the edges of each book page. Each page was cut at specific points, then the cut sections were folded and re-stripped to form the recessed part of a heart shape. Finally, I folded the remaining sections to complete the outer contours of the heart. The original image—once fragmented and abstracted—only becomes visible when the book is viewed as a whole.

Summer in my heart of hearts explores the fluid boundary between the abstract and the recognizable, the obscure and the revealed. This ebb and flow mirrors my own creative journey. The work’s physical transformation parallels the metaphorical intensity of summer—its heat, its vibrancy, and its emotional resonance.

The digital age is an inexorable part of life, but it comes at a cost. One of those costs is that we’re losing tangible evidence of our lives: handwritten letters, drawings on paper, family recipes written out—even grocery lists. This dress was created to showcase and celebrate the beauty in things that include our handwriting, as evidence of our creativity and our humanity. The paper sculpture includes vintage and antique ledger pages, letters, envelopes, bank checks, and pages from student notebooks. By using techniques such as sewing, pleating, and embossing, it elevates this evidence into the realm of something special. Materials: Vintage handwritten papers (ledger pages, notebook pages, handwritten correspondence, bank checks, envelopes)

Bird Totem is an expression of my love of birds, and their precious and precarious place in the environment.  The box structure serves as a place of protection from the outside world.  Five bird collage pages are sewn together in a folding accordion structure, and housed in a book board box.  The bird collages are made with unique painted and printed papers, a technique I use in my (almost) daily practice.  The headboard is also made with printed and painted papers collaged and stitched by hand and machine. 

As an artist, I’m drawn to the geometric, the abstract, and the colorful. As a wordsmith, I appreciate exploration, complication, and surprise. As a creator of book arts, I love when content and form have a dynamic relationship, especially one which has kinetic interaction between the work of art and the reader, the viewer.

Given a monthly assignment to create a vegetable book, a seeming absurd, dull activity, I assumed I wouldn’t bother. As I explored a recent wire structure I’d been playing with, and realized the wires allowed free-hinging movement with three-sided shapes, an idea began to form. I was playing with triangular pages, triangles being a favorite trope, one that carries the emotional triangulation of my family of origin, the trinitarian god of my upbringing, and the tendencies toward the number three carried through our culture—including the lists of threes within this statement.

Amazingly, a four-sided box of equilateral triangles emerged—even the combination of its four three-sided objects closing the 3D shape was pleasing. But the shape looked a bit like an onion, and like an onion, a series of them could peel away, layer-by-layer, ultimately revealing emptiness.

As the book developed, I chose to carve onion images into colored, yet translucent velum which mimicked qualities of onion skin. I researched onion history and lore, seeking out small writings of interest to add to the pages, the walls, the leaves of the onion bulb.

I have worked as a professional artist for over 30 years in my Connecticut studio. I am a multimedia artist working in a range of modalities including fiber art, collage, sculpture, photography, printing, cyanotype, eco printing and, most recently, book art. I often combine multiple media in a single piece. Over the course of my career, I have been an avid explorer of both material and technique, often including found materials and everyday humble items in my pieces. Serendipity and surprise are hallmarks of my singular work.

I started making books during the pandemic. With an abundance of free time and a desire to explore, I set out on my bookmaking journey. Books have offered me the opportunity to present my work in new and exciting ways. I have frequently used my books to present a body of related art work, while just as often I use them as vehicles to capture the essence of special places and moments in time. I cherish the fact that, unlike most other forms of art, the viewer gets to touch and interact with a book, thereby becoming an active participant in the process of the book becoming a meaningful piece of art.

Over the course of my career, I have shown my multi-media work in many notable venues including many museums. This has included solo and group shows at the Fuller Craft Museum, The New Britain Museum Art, The Newport Museum of Art, the Hunterdon Museum, the Bristol Art Museum, the Mattatuck Museum and more. My books and book related art have been exhibited at the Silvermine Art Center, The Hammond Museum, The New Britain Museum of Art , Sebastopol Center for the Arts, The Rochester Library,  The Brookfield Craft Center, The Soho Photo Gallery. My book art is represented by the Kelmscott Bookshop in Savage Maryland. As I move forward book art will remain intrinsic to my art practice.