how are things?: intimacy and forgetting in the presence of mundane book materials

This thesis is about how forgetting gets made. It is about how mundane book materials, from paper to ink to thread to glue to board to wood to leather to cloth and on and on, are spaces in which forgetting can occur, and in which intimacy among makers can be recognized. Through nine visual works, I played with and reshaped these mundane book materials in order to call attention to some of their not-so-evident histories, and in order to show how the presence of these materials alone makes it difficult to learn about and call to mind their intimate histories of making. Books can be very plain, unnoticeable things; these works seek to put books’ plainness on display, and at the same time surface the historical complexity of their materials and forms.