THE ART OF THE BOOK Eleventh annual exhibition of handmade artist books, altered books and book-related materials
THE ART OF THE BOOK Eleventh annual exhibition of handmade artist books, altered books and book-related materials
Jody Alexander Islam Aly Alice Austin Ken Botnick Sarah Brown Kim Henigman Bruce Inge Bruggeman ValĂŠrie Buess Julie Chen
Marie Dern Alisa Golden Andrew Hayes Helen Hiebert Meg Hitchcock Charles Hobson Lisa Kokin Jacqueline Rush Lee Emma Lloyd
Suzanne Long Sharon McCartney Emily Payne Maria Porges Danielle Giudici Wallis Kazuko Watanabe Beata Wehr Barbara Wildenboer
THE ART OF THE BOOK Eieventh annual exhibition of handmade artist books, altered books and book-related materials Jody Alexander, Islam Aly, Alice Austin, Ken Botnick, Sarah Brown, Kim Henigman Bruce, Inge Bruggeman, ValĂŠrie Buess, Julie Chen, Marie Dern, Alisa Golden, Andrew Hayes, Helen Hiebert, Meg Hitchcock, Charles Hobson, Lisa Kokin, Jacqueline Rush Lee, Emma Lloyd, Suzanne Long, Sharon McCartney, Emily Payne, Maria Porges, Danielle Giudici Wallis, Kazuko Watanabe, Beata Wehr, Barbara Wildenboer
May 3 to June 5, 2016 Reception for the artists: Saturday, May 14, 5:30 to 7:30 Front Cover: ValĂŠrie Buess, Eventually Alive, 2013 (detail) Back Cover: Emma Lloyd, Evolution Triptych, 2004 Photo Credits Jody Alexander: r.r.jones Alice Austin: Jon Snyder Ken Botnidk: Richard Sprengler Julie Chen: Sibila Savage Marie Dern: Martin Ledyard Casey Gardner: Luz Marina Ruiz Alisa Golden: Sibila Savage Andrew Hayes: Steve Mann Meg Hitchcock: Laumont Photographic, NYC Lisa Kokin: Lia Roozendaal Jacqueline Rush Lee: Paul Kodama, Hawaii Sharon McCartney: John Polak Photography Direct inquiries to: Seager Gray Gallery 108 Throckmorton Avenue Mill Valley, CA 94941 415-384-8288 seagergray.com All rights reserved. Catalog can be purchased through the gallery for $25 plus handling and shipping. Email us at art@seagergray.com
--------------------Jody Alexander
New Acquisitions, 2015 (above) To Be Shelved, 2015 (below)
(from series KEEP: Modern Library),
antique linen, book pages, book cloth, stencils, 15.5 x 18”, 15 x 17”
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On Hold, (from series KEEP: Modern Library), 2015 (right)
book pages and book cloth from withdrawn library books, thread, mull, stencils 5 x 52” unique book
Jody Alexander San Francisco Bay Area
KEEP: Modern Library is a project and series inspired by withdrawn library books, Japanese textiles, the art of mending, and a KEEP stamp that was discarded from a library. One particular book, Records Management: A Collegiate Course in Filing Systems and Procedures, has been the artist’s muse throughout the project as she represents a once useful book that has become obsolete and has no place in the college library where she resided since 1974. Nonetheless, the book is endearing to her for its bookness: design, color scheme, endpapers, graphic images and outdated office scenes. Imagery from that book floats through all the pieces in this series like apparitions. All the bookcloth and book pages in this project are from one library’s weeding project of their circulating collection. This series is in no way a criticism of libraries. Weeding projects are conducted in an educated, informed and thoughtful manner and are necessary for the health of library collections. These books are no longer useful or relevant and many are damaged or contain outdated information. From the artist: Although these books are no longer useful, as they were originally intended, they are no less dear to me in many ways. I find myself hopelessly enamored of scientific illustrations or the ombre fading of the book cloth or the brittle yellow tape used in a dated repair. Like stray dogs I wanted to take them all home and many did follow me back to my studio and eventually became part of this Modern Library. Some of them have been given new life in pieces that I think possess beauty and others, in an attempt to make something useful out of the combined dead, have become monsters like Dr. Frankenstein’s creation.
Jody Alexander is an artist, bookbinder, papermaker, librarian and teacher who lives and works in Santa Cruz, California. She makes paper, in the Eastern-style, and uses her papers to bind books with exposed sewing on the spine in a number of historical and modern binding styles. She combines these books with found objects, wooden boxes and drawers, metal, bones, etc. to create sculptural works. Her pieces celebrate collecting, storytelling, and odd characters. She also likes to rescue books in distress and give them new life as rebound books, scrolls and sculptural pieces.
--------------------Islam Aly
Al Rahal, the Traveler, 2016
three hole pamphlet binding in accordian binding, sewing on paper, writing, cave paper, linen thread 5 x 2.5 x 2.5”, (40” when opened) variable edition of 20
--------------------Islam Aly
Crucial Perimeter I, 2016
laser engraved edges, embossed leather covers, linen thread. Modified Ethiopian and Coptic binding, with Coptic end band 2.5 x 3 x 4.5” edition of 20
Islam Aly
Iowa City, Iowa / Egypt
“Traveling—it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.” Ibn Battutah, The Travels of Ibn Battutah Al Rahal, the Traveler is inspired by the travels of Ibn Battutah, one of the great explorers during the thirteenth century. He set out from Morroco in 1325. When he returned home roughly 30 years later, he had crossed about 75,000 miles and nearly every part of the Islamic world, as well as many non-Muslim lands. The sewn lines represent Ibn Battutah’s extensive travels. Their variations and intersections are an aesthetic representation for the distances he covered. The book urges the viewer to travel within its covers, explore the structure and pages, then reflect on the journey and experience. Crucial Perimeter explores the dichotomy between what’s inside a book and what is outside. The book has no text or images on its folios. When the book is closed, the viewer can see the content on three edges of the book, but depending on how the book is opened, some of the content on the edges diffuses and becomes illegible converting into traces of texture. Islam Aly received a BA and an MA in Art Education from Helwan University, Egypt. He is currently a doctoral candidate in the College of Education’s Art Education program at the University of Iowa. In August 2013 he finished the MFA program at the University of Iowa Center for the Book. His books explore the possibilities of historical bindings in contemporary book art practice. They have appeared in international exhibitions in the United States and abroad, and in private and public collections including the New York Public Library, the W.S. Hoole Special Collections Library at the University of Alabama, the National Library of Chile, the University of Iowa Special Collections and Bibliotheca Alexandrina. Aly’s books play with classical forms and bindings, but by expanding spines, carving into the upper and side edges of the text block and laser cutting letters and symbols into his well-chosen papers, he has been able to create forms that are in perfect agreement with their content. Both in form and content, Aly explores the boundaries between tradition and contemporary life.
--------------------Alice Austin
Red, Yellow, Blue, 2000
installation of 49 books created with offset lithography in five color runs 72 x 58� edition of 500
Alice Austin
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Red, Yellow, Blue is an installation of 49 books created by Alice Austin at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Austin was invited to be a visiting artist there in the book arts/printmaking department and spent her time in the Borowsky Center for Publication Arts where she created an artist book in an edition of 500. The book was printed by master printer Lori Spencer on a Heidelberg KORS one-color press. Five different colors required five individual press runs for each side of the interior pages of the book. The cover required four press runs, doublesided.Twenty percent of the edition was kept by the University. 400 books are held by the artist, 98 of which were used to create two installations. Forty-nine of them are used to create the wall installation seen here. Alice Austin is a Philadelphia printmaker and book artist. She has worked as a book conservator since 1999 at the Library Company of Philadelphia, the first library in the U.S., founded in 1731 by Benjamin Franklin. She is on the faculty at the University of the Arts, teaching book structures, and also teaches workshops at the Center for Book Arts, NYC, and other locations. She earned a BFA from the Philadelphia College of Art, now the University of the Arts, and has been an active member of the Guild of Book Workers since 1998. Austin has been awarded several artist residencies in Europe and Japan, some of which involve teaching and exhibiting. Her work is widely held in museums, private, public and special collections worldwide. Her art work is also featured in the books 500 Handmade Books, Magic Books and Paper Toys, 1000 Artists’ Books and Making Handmade Books. Her artist books have been reviewed in Fine Books magazine and on-line in the New Yorker magazine’s Book Bench blog.
--------------------Alice Austin
Red, Yellow, Blue, 2000
close up of individual books
--------------------Ken Botnick
Diderot Project, 2015
Letterpress book with with 6 different papers 7.25 x 11.25� edition of 70
Ken Botnick St. Louis, Missouri
“I believe we make books in order to discover our subjects.” - Ken Botnick Winner of the 2015 MCBA (Minnesota Center for Book Arts) Prize, Diderot Project is a complex orchestration of content, perception and masterful bookmaking. The project is the result of a 5-year investigation of the Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers of Diderot and d’Alembert. It is a 150-page visual and textual narrative (meditation) on several subjects Botnick highlighted in the Encyclopédie, namely, the nature of craft, the hand, work, tools, machines, dreams, the senses and the imagination. There are six different papers in the book, including three specially watermarked sheets Botnick designed for the edition and made at Dieu Donne paper in New York. Over 220 press runs and 8 pounds of inks were used in the production of this book. This is not a book about the Encyclopédie. It might, more accurately, be described as a book of, or with, or even because of the Encyclopédie. While it began primarily as a visual exploration of the original plate volumes seen through the lens of the camera, it grew by considering the encyclopedia as a system of correlations and leaps of the imagination, which was Diderot’s intent. It is difficult to encapsulate such a layered work in a limited space. We recommend that you look up the video of Mr. Botnick’s talk on the book at the Boston Athenaeum at http://bit.ly/KenBotnick_DiderotProject. Ken Botnick is a printer/publisher of limited editions, first as coproprietor of Red Ozier Press in New York, and today under the imprint emdash in St Louis. His work is found in collections around the world, including The Getty Center for Humanities, The Bodleian Library, The Newberry Library, the Yale Arts of the Book Collection, and other notable collections. The Red Ozier Press archive is part of the permanent collection of The New York Public Library. In 2006, Botnick was a Fulbright Scholar in residency at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India. His book, Kamini, was selected by the American Institute of Graphic Arts for “50 Books/50 Covers,” 2007.
--------------------Sarah Brown
84 Hours, 2007
reclaimed paper, linen tape, linen thread 1.77 x 3.9 x 177 “ unique book
Sarah Brown West Yorkshire, UK
84 Hours reflects on the working life of William Wood, a bookbinder who died in Newgate Prison in 1788, having served half of a two year sentence. He had been imprisoned for putting pressure on his master to reduce the working week by one hour; from 84 hours to 83 hours. A single book was bound from 6am until 8pm for 6 days, recreating William’s working week. It was physically and mentally extremely demanding. Although the artist chose to undertake this challenging week, people across the globe are still forced to endure these extreme working hours throughout their working lives. Sarah Brown’s extensive education includes foundation studies at Leeds College of Art and Design, a BA in Embroidery from the Manchester Metropolitan University and a graduate degree in Creative Business Development. Her work is held in the collections at the Tate Gallery in London as well as other international institutions. Underpinning her practice is a fascination with the traditional craft of bookbinding and a determination to raise the profile of this declining industry. Brown uses a combination of embroidery, paper folding, cutting and traditional bookbinding. These very repetitive techniques force a real engagement with the materials, typically papers, threads, tapes, cloths and leathers. She strives to create a balance between art and craft, always maintaining an environmentally and ethically responsible approach.
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Kim Henigman Bruce New Edition, 2015
altered book with encaustic and thread 4.5 x 8 x 4.5� unique book
Kim Henigman Bruce Alberta, Canada
THE BODY of BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, Printer, like the cover of an old book, its contents torn out,and stripped of its lettering and gilding lies here, food for worms; Yet the work itself shall not be lost, For it will (as he believed) appear once more, in a new,and more beautiful edition, corrected and amended By The AUTHOR. - Benjamin Franklin New Edition is part of Kim Henigman Bruce’s Pocketbook Series. The quote is an epitaph that Benjamin Franklin wrote for himself while he was still a young man. The “For Margaret” on the reverse side is a shout out to women, whose epitaphs often read “wife of.” Button Up is from her Jacket Series which references the metaphorical phrase “can’t judge a book by it’s cover”, as one shouldn’t prejudge the worth or value of something, by its outward appearance. The artist humanizes the book by emulating a jacket as an article of clothing complete with fasteners and buttons. Kim Henigman Bruce studied fine art at The Alberta College of Art & Design and The University of Calgary from 1989 to 2002. She holds a degree in Interior Design where she received her diploma from Mount Royal University. A native Calgarian, she has been published in the New York Times in conjunction with a group show at the R & F Gallery in Kingston, N.Y. and the exhibition catalog from the Grassi Museum in Leipzig, Germany. She has also been reviewed in See Magazine, FFWD Magazine and The Gauntlet. Her work is in the collection of the Alberta Foundations for the Arts and is privately and publicly collected throughout Canada, Australia, and the Netherlands. Bruce uses books and other found materials with encaustic to create objects that explore issues of identity and gender. While the works might be specific references to her own experience, her intention is to leave them open-ended enough to allow others to bring their own impressions to what they see. Often Bruce’s work explores the dichotomy of early life expectations to conform to a traditional woman’s role and to adhere to prescribed modes of behavior learned in her upbringing, sometimes in conflict with her need for honest creative expression and self-sufficiency.
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Kim Henigman Bruce Button Up, 2015
altered book with encaustic and found objects 7 x 3 x 2” unique book
--------------------Inge Bruggeman
Nowhere to Go, 2009
letterpress printing from handset type and photopolymer plates 18.75 x 4.5 x 1� edition of 30
Inge Bruggeman Reno, Nevada
Nowhere to go is built around several poems by Alan Loney. This book was printed from handset type and hand-processed photopolymer plates and includes gouache painting on Hahnemühle German Etching paper. It was made in an edition of 30 copies in 2009. This book is an attempt at capturing the beauty, brevity, and fragility of life through words, image, and structure. In this case it is a life lived through the book, the body, and the act of writing itself. It is an homage to the French poet and artist bookmaker Pierre Lecuire, who worked in close collaboration with Nicolas de Staël, Lanskoy, Etienne Hajdu and Genevieve Asse in publishing unprecedented works defining the book as the finishing-touch of a poem. Inge Bruggeman is assistant professor and director of graphic arts at the Black Rock Press. Her work revolves around the idea of the book - the book as object, artifact and cultural icon. She makes artist’s books, fine press publications, prints and other text-based art that investigates our personal and collective relationship to the shifting role of the book, print media and text in our world today. Inge’s research frequently revolves around her interest in the history of the French livre d’artiste and the contemporary artist’s book
-------------------------------ValĂŠrie Buess
Boycotting its original content, 2011 altered book, cut, rolled and mounted 8.66 x 7.5 x 3.15� detail on right
Valérie Buess Marburg, Germany
For over 25 years, Valérie Buess, a Swiss artist living in Marburg, Germany (near Frankfurt), has exhibited around the world Her favorite materials are recycled paper from old magazines, books and phone directories. Shaped by rolling, collage, sewing and folding, they are transformed into imaginative sculpture, each typically created from a single object. In Boycotting its original content, Buess has created a form that continues to operate like a book, its spiny pages bound like a codex. She has subverted the original content by rolling pages into quill-like forms, giving the work an organic composition like something that might be found in nature. Almost Alive is a podlike work created from a telephone directory. Here too, the form is organic and interacts with the environment, a metaphor for the directory itself – a compendium of essential information about individuals in a municipality forming a cohesive population. Buess enjoys the process of manipulating the paper and finding new forms, often leaving the original content far behind while accidently creating new metaphors discovered in the process.
-------------------------------Valérie Buess
Eventually alive, 2013
altered telephone directory, cut, rolled and mounted 7.5 x 5.5 x 1.2 “ detail below“
Julie Chen San Francisco Bay Area
Bitter Chocolate is an exploration of chocolate through the lenses of fact, fiction and culture. The book weaves together a fictional mythological narrative with historical facts and the artist’s own personal experiences to create a portrait of chocolate that is both lyrical and unsettling. The Jacob’s ladder structure allows for four distinct presentations of content, two on each side. The full meaning and impact of the story is only revealed when all four parts of the content are discovered and read. Flying Fish Press was established in 1987 by internationally known book artist and book art educator Julie Chen. The press focuses on the design and production of limited edition artists’ books with an emphasis on three-dimensional and movable book structures and fine letterpress printing. Chen’s approach to the artist’s book involves intensive explorations of both form and content. Her work is heavily rooted in the ideas of the book as a physical object and a time-based medium. She views reading as an intimate act in which the reader must be in close physical proximity to the book, can control the pace of reading through the self-directed turning of pages, or equivalent action, and must interact with the book through the manipulation of the book’s physical structure. Chen strives to present the reader/viewer with an object that challenges preconceived ideas of what a book is, while at the same time providing a deeply engaging and meaningful experience through the presentation of her own text and imagery in a purposefully structured format.
-------------------------------Julie Chen
Bitter Chocolate, 2016
letterpress from photopolymer plates 3.5 x 14.75 x 1.875”
Marie C. Dern/Danielle Giudid Wallis San Francisco Bay Area/Redlands, CA
The Wreck of the Hesperus Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Marie C. Dern Danielle Giudici Wallis Ten copies. Edition Varie Jungle Garden Press 2016 From the Artists: This is a Wonder Book. We wonder what will happen. Ten copies were letterpress printed. Multiplication. Five were sent to Danielle. Division. Danielle used addition and subtraction. She sent these to Marie. Marie did the same, but different. Additional copies went back and forth Until the sum of 10 emerged with variable differences. This book is still in process and will arrive at the time of installation having gone back an forth between the artists. After their work on “Crow” and “Sunny Side Up.”, we know it will be worth the wait!
Alisa Golden
San Francisco Bay Area
Alisa Golden’s Housework is a neighborhood of six interactive, house-shaped boxes that open to reveal small books and objects within. It is accompanied by a houseshaped quilt. Both the house boxes and the quilt have been printed with images from the artist’s many earlier artist books. The individual titles of the book are They Must Agree, Fragile, Green House Not on the Corner, The Divide, Dandelion Roam and Sea Light. The installation becomes a metaphor for diversity. Each of the books have a different point of view, different concerns and different points of departure. Every element has a different story to tell. Alisa Golden works with the book as an expressive art form. She explores layered painting, printmaking, and boxmaking techniques, combining them with original poetry and short stories. In addition to her work with paper, she creates books and objects with materials such as handmade felt, beeswax, glass microscope slides, and sticks. She is the owner of never mind the press. Her books have been exhibited internationally are in the special collections of numerous universities, museums and libraries across the country. Alisa is the author of five instructional books: Creating Handmade Books, Unique Handmade Books, Expressive Handmade Books, and Making Handmade Books (Sterling Publishing 1998, 2001, 2005, Lark Crafts 2011), and Painted Paper (Sterling/ Lark Books 2008).
-------------------------------Alisa Golden
Housework, 2016 (left)
a house-shaped quilt accompanied by six interactive house-shaped boxes that open to reveal small books and objects within 38.5 x 31 x 3.5”
-------------------------------They Must Agree, 2016 (lower left) handwritten text on painted papers; thread; handprinted and handmade book cloth 3.5 x 5.5 x 3.5”
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Sea Light, 2016 (lower center) handwritten text on gessoed mulberry paper and painted Arches Text Wove 3.5 x 5.5 x 3.5”
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Fragile, 2016 (lower right) frottage text on mulberry paper adhered to painted Stonehenge paper3.5 x 5.5 x 3.5”
Andrew Hayes
Penland, North Carolina Andrew Hayes’ sculpture, Basin is a perfect example of how an artist can push his materials into increasingly refined means of expression. In this sculpture, Hayes has created a groove in the edges of the paper that curves upward from left to right. The shape of the groove perfectly matches the notches in the steel, further integrating the distinct contrast of the materials. The orchestration of curved to straight line is achieved seemingly effortlessly, but clearly, Hayes continues to challenge himself with these sophisticated forms. Andrew Hayes grew up in Tucson, Arizona and studied sculpture at Northern Arizona University. The desert landscape inspired much of his early sculptural work and allowed him to cultivate his style in fabricated steel. After leaving school, Andrew worked in the industrial welding trade. While living in Portland, Oregon, bouncing between welding jobs and creating his own work he was invited to the EMMA collaboration. This one-week experience was liberating for Andrew and he was encouraged by his fellow collaborators to apply to the Core Fellowship at Penland School of Crafts. During his time as a Core Fellow, Andrew was able to explore a variety of materials and techniques. Surprisingly, the book became a big part of this exploration. In this work he faces the challenge of marrying the rigid qualities of metal with the delicacy of the book page. Seager Gray discovered Hayes during his 2012 exhibition at the Portland Museum of Contemporary Craft. Since that time, he has been included in exhibitions and collections at Yale University, Hartford University, the Morris Museum in Morristown, New Jersey and the Mesa Contemporary Art Museum in Mesa, Arizona to name a few. His September exhibition in the gallery was a resounding success garnering critical review and many new collectors. His work is characterized by a combination of extreme mastery of materials and an innate understanding of form.
-------------------------------Andrew Hayes
Basin, 2016 (left)
steel, book pages, paint 14 x 6 x 4”
-------------------------------Obduct, 2016 (right) steel, book pages 11 x 11 x 7”
-------------------------------Helen Hiebert
Interluceo, 2016
artist-made abaca and watermarked cotton papers, paper cut illustrations 9.187 x 9.187�
Helen Hiebert Edwards, Colorado
Interluceo derives from Helen Hiebert’s ongoing interest in geometry, paper and light. Interluceo means to shine or gleam between; to be transparent; to let light through gaps. The white handmade papers feature seven intricate geometric watermarks in a cotton/abaca paper blend, relating to the numbers one through seven and their corresponding shapes (point, line, triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon, septagon). Seven papercut illustrations by BÊatrice Coron grace seven sheets of translucent handmade abaca paper in the hues of the rainbow, and the illustrations portray the mysteries of life: a baby in the womb, a couple, a child, the child gaining strength and running to embrace life, the building of a home (the pentagonal shape), exploring the world and finally spiritual contemplation. Light and color are the magicians that make watermarks, shadows and shapes appear and disappear as you turn the pages. The text was printed letterpress in Dante by Tom Leech, Palace of the Governors Press, Santa Fe, NM from polymer plates made by Boxcar Press. Helen Hiebert is celebrating her 25th year as a papermaker and book artist with a retrospective catalog. This catalog is being published on the occasion of the exhibition of The Secret Life of Paper: 25 Years of Works in Paper by Helen Hiebert, a retrospective at the Kalamazoo Book Arts Center and the Waldo Library at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan, April 2016. Her work can be found in the collections of over 30 Universiities including Harvard, Yale, and the Library of Congress,
Meg Hitchcock Brooklyn, New York
In Mundaka Upanishad, artist Meg Hitchcok carefully takes letters from the Koran to form a sacred Hindu text. The text is one of the most widely translated Upanishads, written in the form of mantras used for teaching and meditation on spiritual knowledge. The Upanishads are considered by Hindus to contain utterances concerning the nature of ultimate reality and describing the character of and path to human salvation. The text drawings of Meg Hitchcock are examinations and dissections of the word of God, according to varied disciplines. The artist deconstructs a sacred text by cutting its individual letters, and reassemble them to form a passage from another holy book. The Koran is transformed into the Bible, the Bible into the Bhagavad Gita, and so on. Hitchcock discourages a literal reading of the text by eliminating punctuation and spacing; a sentence from one text merges with a passage from another. By bringing together the sacred writings of diverse religions, she undermines their authority and is able to speak to the common thread that weaves through all scripture. The labor-intensive aspect of Hitchcock’s work is a meditation practice as well as an exploration of the various forms of devotion. A long history in Evangelical Christianity formed her core beliefs about God and transcendence, but she later relinquished the Christian path. She found herself gravitating toward Eastern Mysticism, and is deeply moved by Islam. The work is a celebration of the diverse experiences of spirituality and the universal need for connection with something greater than oneself. ‘In the end,’says the artist, ‘the holy word of God may be nothing more than a sublime expression of our shared humanity.’ Meg Hitchcock lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute and studied classical painting in Florence, Italy. Her work with sacred texts is a culmination of her lifelong interest in religion, literature and psychology. Hitchcock’s work has been shown in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, London and Berlin, and reviewed in Art in America, ArtCritical, The New Criterion, Huffington Post, Hyperallergic and The Daily Beast. Her work is included in “State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now” at Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas.
-------------------------------Meg Hitchcock
Mundaka Upanishad, 2012
paoer, letters cut from the Koran 28 x 22.5”
-------------------------------Charles Hobson
The Man in BogotĂĄ, 2015
handmade artist book with photocollages by Mary Daniel Hobson 9.75 x 12.25 x 1.5�
Charles Hobson San Francisco Bay Area
Amy Hempel’s elegant and spare short story offers an insight about how fragile and often unreliable are the judgments we make about events in our lives. The question at the end of the story opens the gaze to wider possibilities that may come with reflection and time. “How do we know what happens to us isn’t good?” The story is a proposal to resist certitude.The design of the book connects words, photocollages and paintings of the night sky into a series that is linked to the essential meaning of the story. The Man in Bogotá has been made as a limited edition of forty copies in the summer and fall of 2015. Each copy has been signed in the colophon by the author, artist and designer. The book measues 11 x 8.75 x 1 inches. The box measures 9.75 x 12.25 x 1.5 inches. The book is illustrated with photocallages by Mary Daniel Hobson’s photo collages, reminding us of a moment in time when things float, and gravity is held at bay. At the same time as we recognize the beauty of that moment, we know at the next instant things can change and will be seen anew. The photocollages were created by layering photographic transparencies, stitched tissue paper, old maps, handwriting and real bird feathers. They have been reproduced for the edition as archival pigment prints on Entrada 300 rag paper by Rhiannon Alpers at the San Francisco Art Institute. Charles Hobson well known in the Bay Area both for his own finely made artworks in the book medium and for his endless support for artists in the book world. Hobson uses pastel, monotypes and other printmaking variations (such as photogravure) to construct his images for books and works on paper. He is professor emeritus of the faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute and his work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Public Library, the Whitney Museum, the National Gallery, Stanford University, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Getty Center, among others.
-------------------------------Lisa Kokin
Forward and Back, 2015
man’s dress shirt, thread, plexiglass 30.5 x 13 x 12”
Lisa Kokin
San Francisco Bay Area
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. - Martin Luther King, August 23, 1963
Deferred and Forward and Back by Lisa Kokin were inspired by the many incidents of the wrongful targeting and killing of African Americans by police. Each piece contains the complete text of Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech. In Deferred, the artist has used cotton upholstery batting as the substrate for the piece which is made of zipper fragments, each one cut to the exact length of each word of the speech. Forward and Back is stitched onto a cut and reassembled man’s dress shirt. Fragments of the text are stitched backwards over the main text, partially obscuring it; the process of making the piece mirrors the metaphor of the title. Lisa Kokin received her BFA and MFA from the California College of the Arts in Oakland, California. The recipient of numerous awards and grants, Kokin was most recently given the Dorothy Saxe Award from the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco and the Purchase Award from the Richmond Civic Center Public Art Interior Acquisitions Project in Richmond, California. Kokin’s work has been featured in many books and articles including Art Made From Books, Chronicle Press, by Laura Heyenga. Her one person exhibition, How the West Was Sewn was at the Boise Art Museum in 2013. Kokin’s work is often a critique of the socio-political status quo imbued with a healthy dose of levity and a keen sensitivity to materials and process. Sewing and fiber-related sensibilities play a key role in much of Kokin’s work, which she attributes to growing up in a family of upholsterers. Thread, which in the past she used to construct and embellish her work has, in her most recent body of work, become the primary material. Kokin explores irony and memory in her seemingly ephemeral pieces, allowing transiency itself to be immortalized in lasting works of art.
-------------------------------Lisa Kokin
Deferred, 2015
zipper fragments, upholstery batting, thread 47.5 x 7”
-------------------------------Jacqueline Rush Lee Elemental, 2015
manipulated book, ink, graphite 13.5 x 13 x 10�
Jacqueline Rush Lee Kaneohe, Hawaii
Elemental is part of a series by Jacqueline Rush Lee in which each page of the text is obscured by the patient application of inks and graphite. The process gives each page a slight ruffle, producing a natural fanning out of the pages and an alluring organic composition. Jacqueline Rush Lee’s work focuses on the book as object, medium and archetypal form. Working to reveal or transform the nature of a book, she is interested in the aesthetic of books as cultural objects that come with their own histories of use and meaning. By using books as her canvas or building block, Lee transforms their formal and conceptual arrangement through a variety of practices in which the physicality and thus the context of the books have been altered. She is interested in creating evocative works that are cerebral with emotional depth. Jacqueline Rush Lee is an Anglo-Irish sculptor from Northern Ireland who lives and works in Hawaii (USA). She has worked experimentally with the book form for over seventeen years. Her artworks are featured in blogs, magazines, books and international press. Selected bibliography include: BOOK ART: Iconic Sculptures and Installations Made from Books; PAPERCRAFT: Design and Art with Paper and PLAYING WITH BOOKS: The Art of Upcycling, Deconstructing, and Re-Imagining the Book and ART MADE FROM BOOKS, Chronicle Press, 2013 by Laura Heyenga. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Distinction in Ceramics and a Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art from the University of Hawaii at Manoa 2000. She exhibits her artwork nationally and internationally and her work is in private and public collections, including the Allan Chasanoff Book Under Pressure Collection, NY, now at the Yale University Museum.
Emma Lloyd Salford, Greater Manchester, UK
Evolution Triptych is a translation of text into objects that reflect the content. The main motivation behind it is philosophical thought - more specifically the design argument which posits that with such design in nature there has to be an intelligent being behind it. The original books are as follows: ‘The Descent of Man: Part I’ by Charles Darwin, ‘A Guide to Subcellular Botany’ by C. A. Stace and ‘The Road to Man’ by Herbert Wendt. For Lloyd, words take aim at a portion of the truth and that truth is always subject to our own interpretations based on our personal experiences and associations. In exploring ways of distorting and altering the aesthetic form of language, the artist has replicated these books on the origins of life into simulated organisms and cells. Emma Lloyd received her BA in art from the University of Wales in Aberystwyth, graduating in 2004. Though she began as a painter, her interest in visual communication led her to exploring language. In 2013, she was awarded a residency at Salford University in Manchester, UK where she continues to reside. Lloyd’s compelling work has been included in publications such as Typographic Universe, published by Thames and Hudson in the UK and Paper Secret, published by Hightone Books in China. In 2016, Lloyd will take part in exhibitions South Africa and Belgium as well as here in the United States.
-------------------------------Emma Lloyd
Evolution Trilogy, 2004 sculpted books from left to right below Part 1 – 10 x 7.5 x 1” Part 2 – 12.5 x 9 x 2” Part 3 – 8.5 x 6.5 x 1”
-------------------------------Suzanne Long Bugs, 2016
ceramic book 4.5 x 7.5 x 1.5”
-------------------------------Cow, 2015
ceramic book 4 x 7.5 x 1.5”
-------------------------------Le Livre, 2016
ceramic book 7 x 6 x 1”
-------------------------------Sock Monkey, 2015
ceramic book 8 x 7 x 1.25”
Suzanne Long San Francisco Bay Area
Suzanne Long is a clay artist who appears in the exhibition courtesy of Room Gallery in Mill Valley who represent her work. Long’s clay books are utterly simple and perfect, with the power to evoke memories of books seen or read in childhood. Her work is about memory -melancholy and humor, politics and storytelling. Suzanne M Long was born in 1964, raised in Willow Grove PA. She studied Illustration and Graphic Design at Tyler School of Art, getting her BA in 1988. After graduating Long moved to New York and worked as a freelance Illustrator and Production Artist. She traveled to the west in the summer of 1990 and fell in love with the Bay Area where she moved in early 1991. Long continued her work as a freelance Illustrator and Production Artist until 1992 when she rented a studio space in an artist community in Benicia CA and started a transition from commercial work to fine art often blending her efforts in writing into the work. She started working in three dimensions in 1996 and has been a clay sculptor ever since. In addition to her books, Long creates compelling figurative clay works that can be seen at Room Gallery, Mill Valley.
-------------------------------Cowboy Small, 2016
ceramic book 8 x 7 x 1”
-------------------------------Eureka, 2016
ceramic book 7.5 x 8 x 1.5”
-------------------------------Sharon McCartney
Witness: Ephemeral Connections, 2012 (above)
sewn book 10.25 x 4.5 x 1.5”
-------------------------------Evidence, 2012 (upper right)
sewn book 3 x 5.5 x 1.5”
-------------------------------Small Measures, 2014 (lower right)
sewn book 2.75 x 5.5 x 1.25”
Sharon McCartney Belchertown, Massachussetts
For Sharon McCartney, art begins with the long time habit of collecting natural objects in forests, fields and meadows and along lake and ocean shores. She was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and moved to New England in 1983. In 2005 she relocated to western Massachusetts to build a twostory studio surrounded by woodlands. Sharon designed the studio with specific areas for painting, fiber collage, and artist books, as well as with a classroom where she prints her own collage materials and teaches workshops. With a master’s degree in art history from Boston University, Sharon draws from the influences of both Asian and European art with natural themes. Her paintings, fiber pieces and artist’s books have been exhibited throughout United States, and have been included in museum, corporate, university and private collections. Her work has been featured in several books, including: Mixed Media Collage and Altered Books, both by Holly Harrison (Rockport Publishers); 500 Handmade Books (Lark Publishers); and in the publications American Craft, Fiberarts, Somerset Studio, and Surface Design Journal, among others. She co-founded Boston Book Arts and served as its coordinator for five years. She has also served on the board of The Fiber Arts Center in Amherst, MA, and on the Massachusetts Cultural Council in her town. She teaches workshops in collage, painting and book arts.
Emily Payne
San Francisco Bay Area
As a sculptor and former book artist, Emily Payne likes to take apart old books and mine them for their parts. She finds her books in dumpsters or in the discard pile in local libraries. She recycles the books, once functioning primarily as containers for words, and transforms them into a combination of two- and threedimensional collaged and sculptural works. In creating Almost Red, she cut and reassembled the rectangular book covers into a puzzle-like form that she glued together as her “canvas.” She creates multi-layered compositions by attaching pieces of book covers, gouache paint and graphite onto these varied paper surfaces. Like all things alive, the aging books she works with are in an ongoing state of disrepair and decomposition. In choosing to work with dilapidated books, she dramatizes and highlighs the natural process of decay as well as the regeneration that this creative process represents. Emily Payne lives and works in Berkeley, CA. She recently completed a collaboration with Berkeley-based fabric and clothing designer, Erica Tanov, and their prints as well as the original artwork that inspired them, can be seen at the Erica Tanov in Berkeley and Larkspur. She will have a solo show of her wire and book sculptures at Seager Gray Gallery in February 2017.
-------------------------------Emily Payne
Almost Red 2016
book covers on book boards 44 x 45”
Maria Porges
San Francisco Bay Area
A complicated, lifelong relationship with the printed word lies behind Maria Porges’ exploration of books as both physical material and subject matter. A current primary source—both for sculpture and for collages-- is the library left behind by her grandmother Mary Löw, a citizen of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire who avidly read many English classics translated indifferently into German. These unwanted volumes (printed in a Gothic script now legible to few) are destined for landfill, so their new life as art: whether used as books or as fragments of illustration and text, functions as reclamation of their value and, at the same time, serves as an uncomfortable recognition of the decreasing role of books in a digital media world. Porges’ book, What Goes Around is a folio of twenty pages plus title page and colophon in an 8.5 x 9” clamshell box with letterpress title insert on the cover. Each 8 x 8” letterpress print/ page presents a different continuous, circular, original text or story that the reader can enter in a number of different places, rotating the page. Published in 2016 by Words&Pictures and printed at Kala in Berkeley, CA in a signed edition of 20. Her sculpture, Mary’s doublehandled book saw is one of a series of ‘book tools’ made with books that belonged to her grandmother.
-------------------------------Maria Porges
What Goes Around, 2016
clamshell box with letterpress texts 8.5 x 9”
Maria Porges is an artist and writer whose work has been exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions since the late eighties. She received a SECA award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and has twice been in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts. A finalist for the Creative Capital/ Warhol Foundation Art Writer’s Grant in 2014, her critical writing has appeared in many publications, including Artforum, Art in America, Sculpture, American Ceramics, Glass, the New York Times Book Review, and a host of other now-defunct art magazines. She has also authored essays for more than 100 exhibition catalogues and dozens of scripts for museum -------------------------------Maria Porges audio tours. Porges’ one person exhibition, Shortest Stories and Mary’s Double-handed Book Saw, 2015 Exhortations took place at Seager Gray in April of 2016. book pages, tool handle 19.5 x 6 x 2.5”
-------------------------------Kazuko Watanabe Soaring Skies, 2015
photopolymer gravure and intaglio, ten folios 20.5 x 16.75 x 1.5�
Kazuko Watanabe San Francisco Bay Area
The flowing river never stops and yet the water never stays the same. Foam floats upon the pools, scattering, re-forming, never lingering long. So it is with man and all his dwelling places here on earth.
- Kamo no Chomei, Hojoki 1212, translated by Yasuhiko Moriguchi and David Jenkins,1995
Kamo no Chomei was a Japanese author, poet and essayist who wrote Hojoki (“An Account of a Ten-Foot-Square Hut”) Written in 1212, the work depicts the Buddhist concept of impermanence through the description of various disasters such as earthquake, famine, whirlwind and conflagration that befall the people of the capital city Kyoto. In artist, Kazuko Watanabe’s exquisite book, Soaring Skies, she reflects on Kamo no Chomei’s teachings, merging his words and her own reflections on impermanence in this thoughtful work. Watanabe began taking many photographs, capturing moments that caught her imagination and sensibilities. From these photographs, she created photopolymer gravure intaglio prints in ten leaflet books with two text pages. Kazuko Watanabe is a graduate of the San Francisco Academy of Art University and has taught classes on printmaking at both the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley and the University of California, Berkeley. Her multiple color intaglio prints are meticulously crafted in a way most printmakers shy away from due to the inordinate amount of time and patience needed for this particular medium. She handles these stubborn metallic plates with such ease and subtlety that the viewer is generally unaware of the fantastic craftsmanship that is employed to generate the beautiful abstract compositions and delicate color gradations. Ms. Watanabe was the recipient of The 1999 Library Fellows Award from The National Museum of Women in Arts Foundation in Washington D.C. for her bookmaking.
Beata Wehr Tucson, Arizona
Beata Wehr is an award winning visual artist and educator. She was born in Warsaw, Poland, and currently lives and works in Tucson, Arizona, traveling back to Europe every year. She graduated from Warsaw University in Poland with M.A. degree in art history and from the University of Arizona with M.F.A. in painting/ combined media. She paints and creates artist’s books, examining in her work ideas of home, place, time, transience and multicultural experiences. Her works were shown in many international and national exhibitions and are included in nearly 60 public collections in the USA and abroad. Beata is an instructor at the University of Arizona and Pima Community College in Tucson and is available for workshops, private classes and critiques. Paszport is a book about immigration, identity, displacement and nostalgia. The artist digitally collaged several old documents –passport, visas, identity cards, with meaningful ephemera such as a butterfly stamp from a letter from her family. In the middle spread she placed an image constructed from both of her worlds : Sonoran Desert landscape with transplanted and multiplied column of Polish King Sigismunt III Wasa from Warsaw. This very personal work is not only about a significant change in the place where the artist has lived, it also takes the viewer back in time to the eighties and early nineties. Carpe Diem consists of twelve pages with stones stitched to the paper to create a calendar of days. The meditative stitching of a stone to denote each day becomes a metaphor for “seizing the day “ and the illusion that time can be pinned down.
-------------------------------Beata Wehr
Carpe Diem, 2001
paper, stone and thread 8 x 6 x 7”
-------------------------------Beata Wehr
Paszport, 2008
paper, stone and thread 5.25 x 4 x .2”
-------------------------------Barbara Wildenboer
The World Atlas: Deluge, 2016 altered book 22 x 28�
Barbara Wildenboer Capetown, South Africa
Barbara Wildenboer translates content into organic form in her extraordinary carved books. Wildenboer has participated in group exhibitions and art fairs both nationally and internationally, including South Africa, San Francisco, Dubai and Hong Kong. In 2013 she had her 7th solo exhibition entitled Disjecta Membra at Amelia Johnson Contemporary in Hong Kong. Her latest body of work entitled The Lotus Eaters, opened at The Reservoir at the Oliewenhuis Art Museum in Bloemfontein in 2014 and subsequently toured South Africa. She has been awarded several international residencies such as the Unesco-Aschberg residency (Jordan, 2006), the Al Mahatta residency (Palestine, 2009) and the Red De Residencias Artisticas Local (Colombia, 2011) and the Rimbun Dahan artist residency (Penang, Malaysia, 2013). In 2011 she was nominated and subsequently selected as one of the top 20 finalists for the Sovereign African Arts Award for which she received the Public Choice Prize. Wildenboer lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa. She obtained a Masters in Fine Art (with distinction) from the Michaelis School of Art at the University of Cape Town in 2007. Before that she completed a BA (Ed) with majors in English literature, Psychology and Pedagogics at the University of Pretoria in 1996 followed by a Bachelor of Visual Arts from UNISA.
-------------------------------Barbara Wildenboer Ornithology I, 2016 altered book 18 x 22�
-------------------------------Barbara Wildenboer Ornithology II, 2016
altered book 18 x 22�