Book art is my favorite art form because it offers a grand, conceptual space for creative exploration. And although an artist’s book could be also a book-monument, painting, even spatial arrangement, most books are made for one-on-one interactions. They’re zones of privacy. When you create an artist's book you know someone will be touching it, flipping through it. They will smell the ink, notice any change in texture, poke through the holes, re-arrange the loose pages as they get more engaged.
My Halo doesn’t look like a book at first sight. It’s a piece of paper, gently folded into a rectangle, tucked into a translucent slipcover. It is small, just 6 x 10 inches, and it looks delicate. The thing is that unless you buy it, you can’t experience it the way it was intended, not when it is on display at an exhibition, neither through photographs. Which goes for any artist’s book. So here is my attempt to describe how it may feel when flipping through my Halo – a unique artist’s book (as opposed to a limited edition book) that tells a story of She.
When you take my Halo out of its simple thin slipcover, the word ‘halo,’ collaged in the center of a dense ink drawing of short lines that grow around it in tightly stacked rows, pops up. You’re intrigued by the promise of a story (it is a book, at the end). As soon as you touch it, you feel the warmth of handmade paper. Halo is created from Japanese Sekishu, made by Ishimoto in Kochi prefecture. It is one of the oldest papers – thin, delicate, and wispy.
When you open the piece, a new Halo appears, upside down, and the letters OOOO collaged on the opposite side. You can’t help but say it out loud. It echoes.
You notice small white areas in the drawing, like slivers of light they reveal collaged words (like ‘unconscious sense,’ ‘poignantly,’ ‘violent,’ and of course ‘She’ and ‘her’) and you start reading, out loud, as you quickly realize that the sound of the words compliments the sound of the paper.
There is no story, but you shrug it off because the playfulness of it all draws you in and, curious enough, you unfold another part of the book, and then again. The process of unfolding suddenly feels familiar, something clicks. You pick the piece up with both hands, watching it unfold completely, floating on air, and you lay it down. Like a tablecloth. It’s so light you can watch the slow motion of its soft falling.
On the sixteen pages demarcated by the folds, my Halo tells a story of She. (Before it became about Her, I simply thought I deserved a halo for drawing line after line after line, in rows that continued to grow from one edge of the paper to another. But then life kicked in, and it became about Her.) Story is a strong word for Halo’s content, it’s more like a play with words leading you from one section (page) to another.
halo, declared
ancient oooOO that it makes a certain
unconscious sense, Halo
poignantly halo
o, her is ear, violent
aaaa, draws attention
SHE, she, halo
The, finally, the, the, all
Halo, her talking
Working on Halo led to numerous line drawings, and I also explored the idea in printmaking during my residency at the Centre for Print Research in Bristol, UK (I’ll leave that for another post).
(If you wish to learn more about what's behind my arist's books, including Halo, listen to this conversation I had with Angie Butler of the Centre for Print Research in Bristol, UK)
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