Hello All,
I’m part of an artist roundtable talk this coming February 16th at 6PM at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, one of three panelists discussing our Jerome Foundation Book Arts Fellowship projects for 2016.
My project is an innovative exploration of my beloved bio-paper – paper grown in-situ from bacterial cellulose – using this amazing and unusual paper to create a limited edition of books featuring the poetry of e.e. cummings. Using the unique properties of the translucent paper, I will be embedding the text at varying depths within the paper itself, resulting in quasi-three dimensional wordplay; which makes the work of e.e. cummings perhaps the ideal source text to use.
More on this to come, but in the meantime, please enjoy these photos of work samples I created for the talk next week, and a short video clip of a fresh sheet of this paper after harvesting. The work samples are based on the concept I am exploring for my project; laminations of thin sheets of biofilm with embedded text objects between the layers, all made of pure bacterial cellulose to ensure maximum bonding and integration. This means: one single sheet of paper with multiple levels of content within one page!
The finished work will be precisely laser-cut and won’t look anything like this hand-cut sample, quickly done to show the process. It may or may not survive the evening of the talk after it gets handled a fair amount. Let’s hope it does as I’ve already had a request to acquire this piece!
If you’re in the Minneapolis / St. Paul area and wish to hear more about the process, please have a look at the event details above, and I hope to see you there.
Updated – October 31st, 2016: Added recording of my artist talk.