Sweetness

I was trying to remember when I started calling you sweetness. I honestly don't know.  

  

My most recent book came from a short exchange between me and my husband.  At some point in our marriage my husband began calling me sweetness.  I'm a serial nicknamer and thus I have allowed him a few of his choosing.  

I first designed a print taken from the sucrose molecule and then printed it along with text of our short email chain.  I also printed the molecule pattern on the outside flypages. 

Then I bound the two sheets into a single signature using a butterfly stitch.  I secured the tale with a small silver bead I found in the Muttrah souk here in Muscat and a small pull tag.  I housed the book in a slipcase that has a small paper collage and the full sucrose image lightly transferred onto the front using gel medium.  

I've been trying to devise projects that are more meaningful than the blank journals I've been working on for the past few years.  I've found it more successful to start with text - something personal or meaningful to me and work out from there instead of devising the structure and working backwards.  

I've been more productive in my studio the last few months that the last two years combined - 

pictures forthcoming. 

Here's to a year of fruitful making.  

Antelope Lending Library

Believe in the power of libraries to empower and uplift?  Understand their integral role in community building and future shaping?

Consider donating to this project a friend of mine is working on.


No, I don't live in Iowa city and probably never will.  Does that matter?  Nope.   You don't have to either.  The collective good of libraries extends far beyond the cities they serve.

I know - I'm a bit late to the party.  Hurry!  

So Stop Complaining

The Golden Age for Writers

...is right now

By Stephen Marche

Read more: Writing Careers in 2012 - Stephen Marche on the Golden Age of Writers - Esquire http://www.esquire.com/features/thousand-words-on-culture/writing-careers-1212#ixzz2DzeAZEoW

Sperm Donor

Got your attention, huh?

The past few months I've been working on my artist book skills...and they haven't come easily.  I've wanted to make books about a lot of things lately: living in morocco, infertility, changing family dynamics, good books I've read, pictures I've taken, dogs and husbands I love, Moroccan rug prints, the list goes on and on.  But whenever I sit down to tell a story that is personal I'm completely bereft of ideas and enthusiasm.  I don't know if I'm afraid my technical skills won't live up to my emotional attachment to these ideas or what, but It took me 8 months to get halfway through a book about our trip to Portugal last year but then I hated it and dismantled it for parts.

So, Max and I have been pulling prompts from a grocery sack the last few weeks.  He has to write about them and I have to create a book around the prompt.  The first one we drew said "A Golf Caddy Learns a Dark Secret".  Since my reading and thinking habits trend non-fiction I immediately hit the google to research golf scandals and the like - thinking I'd take my inspiration from real life.  (Max wrote a delightful piece of fiction.  Our brains work very differently.)

I came across this crazy story about a caddy who claimed he was seduced by his golfer solely for the purpose of getting pregnant.  He later sued her saying he was an "unwitting sperm donor".  Close enough for me.  I know it's a super weird thing to make a book about, but for some reason it worked for me and I was able to try a few new techniques I'd been wanting to experiment with.

The design and construction are really simple - mostly I wanted to see if I could finish a task and stick to a theme.  Telling a story I had no personal attachment to was a really great exercise.  It let me step back and see what worked and what didn't and how to construct an idea using mostly images.  I think after a few more goes I'll be ready to tell my own stories.      

"Sperm Donor" 

 Accordion Fold  

Paper: Arches Cold Press, Ingres

Matte Medium Image Transfers 

  Text taken verbatim from newspaper clippings