Unspinning and a Constant Whirring
a senior thesis exhibition
May 2016
My senior thesis project was a living work and reading environment for a library of books and ephemera. This includes a series of handmade books, the foremost of which was a picture book written and illustrated by myself. These books were kept by several small, sculpted librarian characters. They were shelved and organized alongside categorized and labeled ephemera and found objects. I constructed an environment for this library with a lamp-lit reading space and a work desk covered in process work and sketches. The environment mirrored the representation of the merging and hybridization of the main elements: the natural found objects and the constructed books and stories. The picture book, entitled Still Skin, is a metafictive retelling of Rumpelstiltskin, in which the miller’s daughter, aware of the reader’s gaze, interacts with the text and scenery of her story. My retelling derives from the inspiration of storytelling and fairytales, an interest in stories’ historical context, their transformations across time and culture, and the agency and responsibility of the author, the reader, and the character. The books of this project are all in some way an attempt to discover the reason behind the resilience of the format of stories and books by creating new ones with alterations and subversions. The link between the library of books and library of objects is seen through each item labeled as an element of a fairytale, either a tangible symbol or an idea. This begins the cycle of creation, recycling familiar found symbols to question, distort, or subvert and create new. The reading space exists to digest the found and the created. The workspace is perhaps too obvious an indication that this cycle, this process doesn’t stop. Nothing is ever more than an attempt.
May 2016
My senior thesis project was a living work and reading environment for a library of books and ephemera. This includes a series of handmade books, the foremost of which was a picture book written and illustrated by myself. These books were kept by several small, sculpted librarian characters. They were shelved and organized alongside categorized and labeled ephemera and found objects. I constructed an environment for this library with a lamp-lit reading space and a work desk covered in process work and sketches. The environment mirrored the representation of the merging and hybridization of the main elements: the natural found objects and the constructed books and stories. The picture book, entitled Still Skin, is a metafictive retelling of Rumpelstiltskin, in which the miller’s daughter, aware of the reader’s gaze, interacts with the text and scenery of her story. My retelling derives from the inspiration of storytelling and fairytales, an interest in stories’ historical context, their transformations across time and culture, and the agency and responsibility of the author, the reader, and the character. The books of this project are all in some way an attempt to discover the reason behind the resilience of the format of stories and books by creating new ones with alterations and subversions. The link between the library of books and library of objects is seen through each item labeled as an element of a fairytale, either a tangible symbol or an idea. This begins the cycle of creation, recycling familiar found symbols to question, distort, or subvert and create new. The reading space exists to digest the found and the created. The workspace is perhaps too obvious an indication that this cycle, this process doesn’t stop. Nothing is ever more than an attempt.