[gentle string music]
- I'm putting together a part of a pop-up
that goes in my most recent book, Panorama,
and the pop-up is made up of four layers,
and then the four layers go into a page.
And everything just gets threaded together,
so there's very little adhesive holding it all together.
Panorama, the theme of the book was climate change.
When I started the project,
it was because I felt personally that
I was really avoiding learning about climate change,
not as an artist, but just as a person.
There are three folded sections in the book.
They're always surrounded by these
panoramic, photographic images.
My work doesn't tend to be political in nature,
but in this case,
the topic seems so important to me as an individual,
that I felt that I would explore it
and see what happened.
And then the next page spread will be a pop-up.
I ended up discovering that in fact,
the issue of climate change
was even scarier than I had anticipated.
So I tried to alternate between facts about where we are today
with meditations on the beauty of the planet.
Even if we're in the middle of big environmental challenges,
we can still appreciate the world we live in.
And then the next section again will be a pop-up,
which would give you a little break from the text,
and have a little bit more of a visual experience.
And now, we're coming to the ending of the piece.
An artist book is really a book that is made by an artist
with the intention that the book itself is the work of art.
This is a book called True to Life.
You open the box, the book itself
is this tablet with panels, and you read the text,
and then you slide up every panel.
I did my training at Mills College,
and we did really study beautiful letterpress printing,
literary texts, beautiful woodblock illustrations,
all put together to make a very luxurious,
very beautiful product.
I think I felt a little bit intimidated
by coming up against the whole tradition of fine press,
about using my own content, so I would labor over, you know,
"Is my writing up to standard?
"Is the illustration good enough to be in a book?"
And it took me years to realize that
I could take what I needed from that tradition,
but then go out and take it to perhaps a place
that no one else was taking it.
"Time and memory are always moving, always changing.
"It is the mind which insists on sometimes staying in one place.
Life must be interpreted while it is being lived."
I produce one book a year,
and I spend maybe three or four months every year
thinking about that book, starting to design that book,
and then printing the pieces, and then we spend years
putting the rest of the edition together for sale.
Why don't you go ahead and put the text scripts
on that piece? - On the whirl?
- Yeah, and I'll trim this.
I feel like sometimes I have a committee of voices in my head
for running my business, and it is a business
because I am printing 100 copies of every piece,
and then we put them together
and sell them to libraries and collectors.
[gentle music]
I'm not an artist who starts with an idea that's very clear,
that I'm going to make a book about climate change
and it's going to have X, Y, and Z.
I think that I do, but very quickly, it becomes clear
that it's not gonna go the way I think it's gonna go,
and I have to constantly adjust.
So this is the project I'm working on now,
and this is a mockup of the project,
so I'm trying out different designs on my computer
in preparation for doing it letterpress.
You have an ongoing text that you read throughout the piece.
The text starts out with the phrase, "This is a test.
"You will not be given any assistance
or instructions on how to proceed."
I wanted to find a technical language
that would be very hard for most people to decipher.
The obvious choice was math
because math has always been a very difficult thing for me,
so I had to get some help.
This was a collaborative process
with a couple of friends of mine
who are really into math and very good at math.
I told them what I needed, which was mathematical equations
that had a lot of really interesting data
embedded in them,
but that most people would not be able to decipher.
My work is really rooted in the physical object,
so I'm using those traditional book arts techniques
to develop an object that is beautiful on some level,
but it also has to have a lot of meaning.
Everything that goes into the piece
should contribute to the meaning of the piece.
When I first started, I spent about five years
producing editions, going to book fairs,
showing the work to librarians,
but it really took about five to seven years
before the press started to turn any kind of profit.
Trying to make a living with your work
is a double-edged sword.
Make sure that you're doing the work you want to do
before you think about
how you're gonna make a living doing it.