To celebrate their upcoming one-year anniversary the Morgan Conservatory, a paper and book arts center in Cleveland, OH sent me two sheets of their handmade paper with the request that I make a piece — the instruction was simply to ‘to as you like incorporating the paper provided.’
Each sheet of the 12×22 inch paper is gray but of slightly different values. The fundraiser is called the Snail Mail Paper Trail so I made a book called Snail class Gastropoda, and decided on a meander book structure. Meander books are easily made from one sheet of paper, but I opted to create panels and stitch the panels together rather than using a fold.
Using a large punch with a spiral pattern, I cut some spirals out of the lighter toned paper, then hand cut some freeform shapes resembling snail trails keeping the cut outs to use in the box. I then laminated the sheets together, and cut the laminated sheets into 8 square panels, each about six inches square.
To minimize the problem of thread tearing the pages at the joints, I cut some mica washers in half, glued them to the paper edges and sewed through both the mica and the paper at each sewing station. I used lightly waxed linen thread and opted to leave the tails of each thread dangling. The text, a piece I wrote using found poetry techniques with Wikipedia as the original source, is laser transfer.
Snail class Gastropoda
found in ditches, deserts, the abyssal depths of the sea.
snails with a gill can be found on land
snails with a lung found in water
gliding along on a muscular foot
covered with epithelial cilia
waves of contractions
move down the ventral.
they walk over razors
a layer of tissue covers the visceral mass
snails need calcium
(the operculum of some has a pleasant scent when burned = incense)
most bear tentacles on their heads
eyes carried on the upper stalks
lower set olfactory
a snail breaks food using radula
chitinous structure microscopic hooks cuticulae
in a quiet setting, a snail can be heard crunching
radula tearing, eating.
the snail grows, so does its shell
secreted material added to the edge
the center of the shell’s spiral made when the snail was young
hermaphrodites
snails perform a ritual courtship
inseminate each other
each brood +/- 100
snails need calcium
eat the egg from which they hatched
cannibalization by babies of other eggs (even unhatched) has been recorded
The paintings of snails are watercolor/gouache. Each page was coated with conservator’s wax after transferring/imaging.
As much as possible I like for my work to include artifacts that have a relationship to the piece, in this case snails. I used a wooden frame with recessed plastic glazing for the box walls. I filled the recessed area with sand and snail shells, covered the plastic with a layer of very thin and translucent Japanese paper, laid in the cut shell and snail trail shapes I’d earlier cut out from the handmade paper, then added another layer of the thin Japanese paper.
The inside of the box walls are covered with gray moriki paper, the outside and top edge of the box walls with multiple layers of Thai unryu. The tray was then affixed to fabric and paper covered book board. A ribbon pull makes it easy to pull the book out of the tray without damage. The box label is laser-transfer.
Technorati Tags: Alicia Bailey , artist book, meander book, morgan paper conservatory, handmade paper, handmade book, snail