An examination of one book, and the elements and ideas that went into it

Using found imagery as a starting point

For the past six years, I have focused my energies on printing broadsides in the literary fine press tradition. Each project began with an existing text, selected by an outside party, with all my design and production choices made in service to that text. For the thesis work, I will deviate from this practice and begin with an idea for a grouping of sequential images. I will build a hand-printed artist book around this set of images. Text and additional images will grow from the initial printed pages. The book will serve as a bridge between my previous fine press printing and a new direction in my studio practice. It is my goal to become less reliant on provided texts and commissions, and to use my own thoughts and images as starting points for works larger in scale. The new work will share with my earlier pieces an attention to detail and strong craft ethic.

I will set formal constraints for this project. I will limit my materials to use only papers already on hand in my collection. For concept, I will navigate between three project ideas I have struggled to realize in past projects. The image component is based on a group of cropped leaf images. I will draw on the language found in tatting instructions, and in the definition of the word cleave to begin to construct a text to accompany the images. The images and text will evolve together as the book is built. Until now, I had conceived of these three elements: leaf images, cleave, and tatting instructions as three separate projects. I think one reason I have not been able to realize them fully on their own is that all three do not really exist independently of one another---in my mind at least. My project is to explore what it is about these three things that I find so compelling, to find how they are linked and describe one another, and then make an artist book expressing that connection.

The edition size and book dimensions will be determined by the materials I have on hand. My goal is to produce an edition size of at least 15 copies, and no more than 30.