Jennie Nayton

Cut paper photographs, books and installations by Australian artist Jennie Nayton. You can see more of her work on her Flickr photostream. Her artist's book pictured here Smoke Unfolding is in the collection of the State Library of Queensland which has the largest publicly accessible collection of artist's books in Australia. Photos published with permission from the artist.

North Drive Press

I like this solution to digital content and physical object. North Drive Press has published five collections of work by contemporary artists. They exist as boxes which contain a loose grouping of multiples and text-based works and interviews. In addition, all of the text/interviews are online and viewable as PDFs.

Founding Father's Altered Text

When I heard this Fresh Air episode about religion and the Founding Fathers, I was blown away to hear about Thomas Jefferson physically cutting out passages from the Bible and pasting them into a new blank book--recreating the text as to how he thought it should read. Many book artists do exactly this. Their medium is book and text. Jefferson's Bible reminded me first of the most well-known example of what is called an "altered text": A Humument by Tom Philips. In that work, the artist drew on and blocked out words in a victorian novel so that a new narrative emerged.

I went on a hunt to find images of the Jefferson Bible and was AGAIN blown away to see these stunning pictures from Alexandria Searls, a photographer who beautifully captures Jefferson's actual cut-up Bibles which are preserved (thank goodness) at his home in Monticello. I haven't found any images yet of the book in which he pasted the passages, though I believe he did publish his version of the Bible which you can now purchase via Amazon. of course.

You can see the full exhibit of Alexandria Searls' photographs of the cut-up Bible at the Monticello website. Alexandria graciously allowed me to publish a few here on the blog.

Just came across this other blog post on more cut-up texts http://blog.whitneyannetrettien.com/2009/03/thomas-jefferons-cut-up-bible.html. cool.

Miniature Gardens Redux

This is an artist's book that I recently rebound. The drawings inside are my own. My training previous to working as a bookbinder is as a painter and printmaker and books were a natural progression for me from printmaking. This was one of the first artist's books I created of my own work circa 2001. Recently, I became dissatisfied with the craftsmanship and decided to rebind it. The pages are all graphite on tracing paper. As you lift one page, imagery may appear or disappear, depending on the layering of the tracing paper pages. It is a simple pamphlet stitch sewn onto a cloth hinge that then gets glued into the case. The case is based on the cover construction of Gary Frost's sewn boards binding. The covers are paste paper, created by me, over boards. The pastedowns are this amazing mustard yellow japanese paper that I drummed on. Label is from the same paper. Title letterpress printed in 18pt Univers.