Biography

The interest in book-binding grew out of a need to create a demonstrative piece for a planned published work that incorporated many hundreds of drawings in a hand-bound book. I soon found that the process of book-binding, especially binding hand-cut pages that emulated what happens in a flip book, took over all of my studio time. The early pieces were stand alone, single volumes that had a small number of pages, each carefully planned and cut into moving shapes, all within the body of the volume. As they became more complicated they accumulated multiple volumes and started to “sprout” appendages of cut paper that extended out from all edges and eventually from the spine as well. The focus of the work is always water, in all its forms and effects on other things, both man-made and natural. The works incorporate a number of signature elements to elicit the information I want the viewer to take away, in the same fashion a writer will use the same elements repeatedly in her writing, like the use odd names, or staging the action in the same time period or location over and over, or simply to have a particular way of crafting sentences. While still exploring the small spaces I create within a few hand-cut volumes, I am actively planning on pieces that address entire rooms using thousands of volumes to depict water structures such as a hurricane, or tsnuami, or a storm front.