Empty vessels and paper portals

Empty Vessels and Paper Portals are two book projects about the spanning of time, how we process memory, and the myths we create to approach uncertainty. Forming handmade paper into letterpress-printed and hand-bound sculptural artist’s books, I invite the reader to navigate these concepts alongside me. Using personal imagery without revealing too much, I allow the reader to bring their own experiences and worldviews to the work.

Empty Vessels begins on the day a beloved companion dies. Letterpress-printed in layers on translucent abaca, the artist book echoes its central idea structurally—what appears full reveals itself, page by page, to be empty. The identity of the deceased is never named. What is offered instead is the shape of the loss and the excavation of the layers of grief.

Paper Portals is a book that takes the shape of four tunnel book structures representing related yet distinct chapters: Window, Door, Tunnel, and Bridge. Each is built around a different threshold. Window reconstructs a childhood memory. Door is a recurring dream: a hidden door that opens onto a secret room containing a pool. Tunnel moves through an ice cave encountered in summer, where the previous winter was still intact—a space of suspended time, and of the wish for revision and navigating the concept of time itself. Bridge is built around a shared afterlife, self-made and deliberately chosen, rooted in love and cherished memory. Paper itself holds memory. It holds the memory of the body that made it, physically showing the subtle dance of the papermaker’s sheet formation through grain direction.

Paper also holds a memory of its own, what is folded remains evident in a crease, a breaking of fibers. These books of handmade paper tether these large and amorphous notions into something the reader can physically handle in the real world while visually navigating the world of memory.