﻿- I'm putting together a part of a popup that goes in my most recent book, "Panorama," and
the popup is made up of four layers, and then the four layers go into a page. And everything
just gets threaded together, so there's very little adhesive holding it all together.
"Panorama," the theme of the book was climate change. When I started the project, it was because
I felt personally that I was really avoiding learning about climate change, not as an artist,
but just as a person. There are three folded sections in the book. They're always surrounded
by these panoramic, photographic images. My work doesn't tend to be political in nature,
but in this case, the topic seems so important to me as an individual, that I felt that I would
explore it and see what happened. And then the next page spread will be
a popup. I ended up discovering that in fact, the issue of climate change was even scarier than I
had anticipated. So I tried to alternate between facts about where we are today, with meditations
on the beauty of the planet. Even if we're in the middle of big environmental challenges,
we can still appreciate the world we live in. And then the next section again will be a popup,
which would give you a little break from the text, and have a little bit more of a visual experience.
And now we're coming to the ending of the piece. An artist book is really
a book that is made by an artist with the intention that the book itself is the work of art.
This is a book called "True to Life." You open the box, the book itself is this tablet with panels,
and you read the text, and then you slide up every panel. I did my training at Mills College,
and we did really study beautiful letterpress printing, literary texts, beautiful woodblock
illustrations, all put together to make a very luxurious, very beautiful product. I think I felt
a little bit intimidated by coming up against the whole tradition of fine press, about using
my own content, so I would labor over, you know, is my writing up to standard, is the illustration
good enough to be in a book, and it took me years to realize that I could take what I needed from
that tradition, but then go out and take it to perhaps a place that no one else was taking it.
"Time and memory are always moving, always changing. "It is the mind which insists on
sometimes "staying in one place. "Life must be interpreted while it is being lived."
I produce one book a year, and I spend maybe three or four months every year thinking about
that book, starting to design that book, and then printing the pieces, and then we spend
years putting the rest of the edition together for sale. Why don't you go ahead and put the
text scripts on that piece? - On the whirl?
- Yeah, and I'll trim this. I feel like sometimes I have a committee of voices in
my head for running my business, and it is a business because I am printing 100 copies of
every piece and then we put them together and sell them to libraries and collectors.
I'm not an artist who starts with an idea that's very clear, that I'm going to make a book about
climate change and it's going to have X, Y, and Z. I think that I do, but very quickly, it becomes
clear that it's not gonna go the way I think it's gonna go, and I have to constantly adjust.
So this is the project I'm working on now, and this is a mockup of the project, so I'm trying out
different designs on my computer, in preparation for doing it letterpress. You have an ongoing text
that you read throughout the piece. The text starts out with the phrase, "This is a test.
"You will not be given any assistance or instructions "on how to proceed." I wanted
to find a technical language that would be very hard for most people to decipher. The obvious
choice was math, because math has always been a very difficult thing for me, so I had to get
some help. This was a collaborative process with a couple of friends of mine who are really into math
and very good at math. I told them what I needed, which was mathematical equations that had a lot of
really interesting data embedded in them, but that most people would not be able to decipher.
My work is really rooted in the physical object, so I'm using those traditional book arts,
techniques to develop an object that is beautiful on some level but it also has to have a lot of
meaning. Everything that goes into the piece should contribute to the meaning of the piece.
When I first started, I spent about five years
producing editions, going to book fairs, showing the work to librarians,
but it really took about five to seven years before the press started to turn any kind of
profit. Trying to make a living with your work is a double-edged sword. Make sure that you're
doing the work you want to do before you think about how you're gonna make a living doing it.