The Book Project: the beginnings

I wanted to do a book project that was organized but not in a linear way. I wanted to have an interaction with the audience that was more than flipping through the pages. I decided to do a set of different categories, the reader could investigate groups of pages in whatever  way they chose.

The images on the pages were going to be selections from drawings I had done in Sumi ink and charcoal. I wanted to exhibit parts of each drawing in a way that a diversity of forms could be shown in a limited vocabulary. I also wanted to show particular elements of the drawings that happened over and over. Below are two of the 8 drawings I used.

I also used text for the work and for a long time could not decide what should be presented. I thought about writing the text myself, but I am not a writer and that was not the focus of the project. I decided to use selections from the writings and interviews of Dutch artist Mark Manders. Manders is one of my favorite artists, I have been reading and following his work ever since I went to the Venice Biennale last year.Below is an example of his work. 

Manders is a poet who became a fine artist and his explanations of his work are carefully chosen. I selected  a sentence or two at a time which I found to be either poetic or very specific and then organized those quotations into sections. Below is an every test of what different pages in the book could look like.

I decided to organize the book into 24 pages, or 6 categories of 4 pages each. Each group of pages was going to go in an envelope. I organized the words and the images separately, then I combined them into distinct groups.