Time (2013)
Artist book: Paper pulp painting, woodcut, and letterpress. Edition of 20: 19.25" x 13.75"
My artist book, Time, is my visual representation of the ways in which people think about time, eternity, and their relationship to human life and death. Each page deals with a different way of thinking and feeling about time. I have chosen short texts to illustrate each image. These different ways include thinking of time in personal terms, as being fragile; of time as being eternal; of time as fleeting. Time can be thought of as being elastic. Time is also seen as flowing constantly in one direction. Perhaps it had a beginning and will have an end. It can be thought of as being destructive. In Hinduism time is thought to be a necessary condition of all growth and decay, and is considered cyclical. Time is also seen as a manifestation of God. People have tried to conquer time by creating works that last well beyond their lifetimes. Certainly time can be measured, and because of this I have included a clock, a calendar, an hourglass, and a sundial in my book. But measurement is only one way to think of time, and these images are not the major focus of the book.
The photos below show some of the work in progress for my book Time. The book is about the different ways people have conceived of time, from the viewpoints of art, religion, literature, science, philosophy. I first made a coloured-pencil mockup. Then I made all the paper for the book, with pulp paintings. Next, I carved and printed woodcuts on the paper. The final steps involved setting the type and letterpress printing it onto gampi. I tore pieces of the gampi with text on them to fit the spaces reserved for the text within the pages, and pasted these onto the paper
The prints may look a little confusing because the images on the left side of the pages don't go with the right side. This is because, since it is a book, one side of an image has to be printed on a different sheet of paper than the other side.
Here are a couple of pages of my mockup:
Below is one of the pulp paintings (for the right side of the page on the left, and the left side of the page on the right), and me proofing the first colour on the print:
And here are two pages after they have been printed (before the text has been added):
