About this piece:

A twenty panel accordion, bound using what I call a baseball stitch, this book uses rust-printed papers and walnut ink. I prepped the pages before leaving on a road trip in April 2019. Among my many adventures was camping for several nights in the Jedediah Smith Redwood Forest in Northern California. While there I sat on a massive stump, stitched these pages together, looked around and doodled on these pages. Later on that same trip I camped in the Deschutes National Forest in Oregon. It was too chilly there to sit outside and draw so I instead spent my time walking and, predictably, gathering dried bits of moss and lichen. Throughout this, and most adventures that have me in forests or woods, the lines of Wendell Berry’s Sabbath Poem, 1985, V form an ongoing chorus in my head.

Handwritten on the panels in walnut ink is the first stanza of that work:

How long does it take to make the woods?
As long as it takes to make the world.
The woods is present as the world is, the presence
of all its past and of all its time to come.
It is always finished, it is always being made, the act
of its making forever greater than the act of its destruction.
It is a part of eternity for its end and beginning
belong to the end and beginning of all things,
the beginning lost in the end, the end in the beginning.

Materials:

book: rust dyed rag paper, waxed linen thread, walnut ink
box: book board, book cloth, moriki and bark paper, dried specimens from the Deschutes National Forest in Oregon, cast acrylic.