books – Ephemerarium

March 15, 2014December 7, 2019

Seven Seas

Folding books is a lot like crochet or knitting: you get in a groove and the action becomes very meditative.

Coverlet: A Lover’s Discourse

The idea for a quilted coverlet simmered for weeks before I could come up with a method to actually make it work. This coverlet is made from the pages of A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes.

read more Coverlet: A Lover’s Discourse

November 18, 2013December 7, 2019

This piece is a sister to Inferno, but celebrates the text with a constellation of gold spots. As with the other books in Dante’s Divine Comedy, circles play a central role in Paradiso (Heaven, or Paradise).

Mrs Dalloway

This diptych was created out of the text of Virginia Woolf’s dazzling short novel, Mrs Dalloway , originally published in London in 1925. The two panels are subtitled View of the Ouse in Daylight (yellow) and View of the Ouse in Moonlight (blue), with daylight referencing Clarissa and moonlight referencing Septimus, two of the central characters/voices of the novel.

Halo

This piece is an apt summation of my art work of the last couple of years– most of which is born out of deep attachment to and reverence for the book form (arguably the most ingenious, mobile, transferable, humanistic, and renewable technology ever devised).

Kindling the Light

Maccabee’s Candles was created using pages of an English translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf (My Struggle) formed into candles. It is a gruesome piece that was not easy to make.

Metamorphosis

Here are two pieces using the text of Franz Kafka’s story, The Metamorphosis. I started with a bilingual German/English edition (Schocken Books, 1968) so that I wouldn’t loose text on the verso of each page.

Golem

These two panels are joined together in a diptych based on the Jewish story of the Golem. The Golem is a kind of magical creature–a superhuman thug really– molded from clay and animated into life by a rabbi with a supreme command of Jewish law and theology.

The Red Line

Simply folding the pages of this Bible resulted in an elegant, geometric form. The red line itself manifests from the visible leftover edge of the pages which are tinted red and bound in black leather.

Mitzvah

One aspect of Jewish texts that fascinates me is the graphic integration of commentary in the Hebrew Bible, or Torah. Jewish texts, especially the Midrash, use different font sizes, or sometimes even different types of script.