ARTIST BOOKS

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An artist book made by journaling my grief, anxiety and sorrow, one signature or so a day, over more than a year's time. Click on photo for details.

Oversized accordion book, pages featuring mixed media art quilts, documenting my favorite walk in my favorite place in the woods.  Housed in handmade clamshell box. Click on photo for details.

Handcrafted artist book in collaboration with an old mushroom identification book written by Nina L Marshall in 1910, focused on mushrooms I have found in my own woods.

An artist book, a poem quilt, a story scroll. Made from upcycled fabrics and old clothing, machine stitched, hand painted and hand embroidered. My poem about the forest I live in is hand embroidered along the scroll. 

During my artist residency at Indiana Dunes National Park, I visited all of the many types of ecosystems present in the park, and included them in an artist book.

During my artist residency at Indiana Dunes National Park, I visited all of the many types of ecosystems present in the park, and included them in an artist book.

During my artist residency at Indiana Dunes National Park, I visited all of the many types of ecosystems present in the park, and included them in an artist book.

Years ago, right after my grandmother died at 90 years old, an oak tree came down in our yard.  I counted the rings, which were also 90. That coincidence became inspiration for a poem and thought experiment, imagining my grandmother and this tree, separated geographically, but living and dying in parallel.

Small book of accordioned hexagons that opens out to reveal an original poem, housed in a handmade box:

Love is a honeycomb - 

thin walls gently touch,

form hexes,

nature's magic angle

between them.

Inside each cell

someone feels safe.

Or trapped.

Someone casts shadows

on the walls, reads

the shapes of others.

Hexagons

are less than round - 

over time things collect

in the almost corners.

Ordinary walls,

but from above,

beautiful,

repetition subtly

sliding into pattern.

The walls are

paper thin,

build a delicate

architecture.

But I bet they would

carry our weight.

Handmade box houses loose "pages" featuring photocopy artwork and original poetry about remembering home.

The Lens of Home

1. The lens of home grows thicker the longer we are gone.

2. Time is nearsighted.

3. An old man looking at childhood through thick spectacles : his eyes look huge.

4. Color gets through.  Shape is distorted.

5. Faces! faces and works, blurred so he thinks he cannot remember.

6. He really just cannot see.

7. The lens of home is convex.

8. Everything is upside down.