Close-up of finished pressed page. Laser cut text pressed within 5 layers of bio-paper to form one large single sheet.

My new work, Specimens, is one of three pieces on show at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts as part of the 2016 Jerome Foundation Book Arts Fellowship. The opening for the exhibition is on November 11th, starting at 6 PM.

The pages will be displayed in sandwiched plexiglass frames, to allow light to pass through and permit the audience to see them floating in space – very much the way the paper looks and feels when handled.

Here’s my artist statement from the exhibition:

Specimens is the first of its kind: a book created with a new bio-paper medium made entirely from bacterial cellulose. Its pages were once alive.

The quality of this new paper, which I developed over the past seven years, is its unparalleled strength and transparency. Each sheet is grown in a vat and harvested after several weeks. After processing, many layers – five or more – are laid on top of one another with the text block carefully placed within. Then the entire stack is pressed. The act of pressing these sheets is what gives them their strength.

Trapped forever within the thin lamina of Specimens’ pages is the poetry of e.e. cummings. The challenge of retaining the poet’s complex typographic wordplay required a new approach for placing text. Drawing upon my fascination with Voronoi tessellations – the natural pattern of cell structures in all living things – I created custom software to generate a Voronoi framework that would hold the text in place. The text block was then laser-cut from Korean hanji.

Close-up of finished pressed page. Laser cut text pressed within 5 layers of bio-paper to form one large single sheet.

Close-up of finished pressed page. Laser cut text pressed within 5 layers of bio-paper to form one large single sheet.

Close-up of finished pressed page. Laser cut text pressed within 5 layers of bio-paper to form one large single sheet.

Close-up of finished pressed page. Laser cut text pressed within 5 layers of bio-paper to form one large single sheet.

Harvesting the raw bio-paper from its growth medium. It is almost completely clear due to holding 200x its weight in water.

Harvesting the bio-paper from its growth medium. Again, the translucency at this stage is surreal.

A processed sheet of bio-paper waiting to be pressed.

Post-processing, vats of bio-paper waiting for selection in the wetroom.

Some very thin sheets of bio-paper floating in the tank. When dry, these will be ephemerally thin.

Laser-cut text from korean hanji, waiting to be placed within the bio-paper sheets and pressed.

A collection of processed bio-paper sheets waiting for pressing.

Ioana helps with placement and cleanup of the text block. This was a one-chance-only moment, once placed on the wet medium it cannot be moved or changed.

Eric inspects the final placement of the text block.

A completed press run of this project.

You may also be interested to watch my 15 minute presentation from earlier this year, talking about my plans for the project and some of the science behind it. Some of the plans changed- many things were tried and discarded, as working with this medium at scale presented some new challenges. Overall I am very pleased with the results and look forward to sharing more photos of the installed work in the next week or two!