Theory of prayer

First and foremost, Theory of Prayer is a body of artwork. This written thesis supplements that body of work with a paper about religion and book art, and a table of all the pieces produced for the project. It also includes photographic documentation of book-objects and installations, and their adjacent texts, such as statements.

In terms of its conceptual content, Theory of Prayer arose from a series of questions of mine. Some of my questions were about space(s): what does it mean for a work to be site-specific? How might gallery work, artist bookwork, and site-specific sculpture inform each other? How might text be incorporated into sculptural bookworks to attempt a reading experience? (or something akin?)

Some of my questions were about the essentials: What is a book? Can an archive be an artwork? What is the nature of information? Finally, I had questions about art and faith: how might the language of prayer enter the 21st-century artist’s book? How is negative space related to negative theology? How might I articulate prayer as an experience of language?

Although this may seem like a broad set of concerns—perhaps too broad—by relying on a limited material vocabulary, and through associative thinking, this body of work locates the common threads between my questions, and negotiates a set of working solutions to them.