In the time of coronavirus: a drawing installation
This work is a response to the coronavirus pandemic, as I have experienced it. There are 52 drawings, all 26.5 by 22 inches, in charcoal and acrylic medium on Rives BFK paper. My plan is to show them as a continuous experience, with the drawings mounted on the walls of a gallery at normal viewing height, with only a couple of inches of space in between them. In this way, they are not fully separate works - instead, they are experienced through time, space, and movement on the viewer's part.
Photo
Each drawing is based on a page from an altered book that I made, titled "7" because it's the 7th altered book I have made. For me (so far) an altered book starts with a sturdy but not valuable book; it should have a sewn binding, decent paper, and a format that I'm attracted to. The content of the substrate book may or may not have any influence on what I do with it. In this case, the substrate book was about marshes, with a photo in the center of most pages. Occasionally I've allowed a bit of those photos to show through in my pages.
My themes in this project are various, such as thinking about biology (especially cellular and growth-oriented images and diagrams), quotes from my clay work (which also references biology) - and in this special case, the coronavirus and human responses to it (including my own). The imagery is painted and collaged, collected from various sources. In fact, you may recognize some of the images, such as the photo of Audrey Hepburn.
An altered book is for me a way to think expansively and intimately at the same time. It's not a format that can be shared with many people. If I were to put a book in a gallery, one person could look at it at a time. Altered books are fragile, because you can't view them without physically turning pages. Normally, the rich but private thinking involved in making an altered book is a valuable experience, and I use it to fuel the making of art that I can share publicly. But this pandemic has made too many things absolutely private. I'm turning that on its head by pushing the contents of the book outward, to a format that can be experienced publicly but still retains the element of time in the viewing: instead of turning pages, you would walk around a room to look at drawings.
In making the drawings, I wasn't trying to reproduce the book's imagery so much as to respond to it by drawing it. There are small and large ways that I deviated from the imagery in the book's pages.
Following are several photos of the book pages. The size of each page spread is about 10 x 17.5 inches. The imagery is from many sources, including textbooks, other books, news photos, my drawings, painting made directly on the book pages, and photographs of my ceramic work.
Each drawing is based on a page from an altered book that I made, titled "7" because it's the 7th altered book I have made. For me (so far) an altered book starts with a sturdy but not valuable book; it should have a sewn binding, decent paper, and a format that I'm attracted to. The content of the substrate book may or may not have any influence on what I do with it. In this case, the substrate book was about marshes, with a photo in the center of most pages. Occasionally I've allowed a bit of those photos to show through in my pages.
My themes in this project are various, such as thinking about biology (especially cellular and growth-oriented images and diagrams), quotes from my clay work (which also references biology) - and in this special case, the coronavirus and human responses to it (including my own). The imagery is painted and collaged, collected from various sources. In fact, you may recognize some of the images, such as the photo of Audrey Hepburn.
An altered book is for me a way to think expansively and intimately at the same time. It's not a format that can be shared with many people. If I were to put a book in a gallery, one person could look at it at a time. Altered books are fragile, because you can't view them without physically turning pages. Normally, the rich but private thinking involved in making an altered book is a valuable experience, and I use it to fuel the making of art that I can share publicly. But this pandemic has made too many things absolutely private. I'm turning that on its head by pushing the contents of the book outward, to a format that can be experienced publicly but still retains the element of time in the viewing: instead of turning pages, you would walk around a room to look at drawings.
In making the drawings, I wasn't trying to reproduce the book's imagery so much as to respond to it by drawing it. There are small and large ways that I deviated from the imagery in the book's pages.
Following are several photos of the book pages. The size of each page spread is about 10 x 17.5 inches. The imagery is from many sources, including textbooks, other books, news photos, my drawings, painting made directly on the book pages, and photographs of my ceramic work.
