still is a bookwork project that had been hovering in my thoughts for many years but it wasn’t until sometime in 2022 that I started to physically work on some early formats and drafts.
In order to “think” through some of the ideas, I needed to literally build and print out mock ups and to work on them with my hands. Decisions about scale; movements, rhythms and interrelationships; materials (paper, etc.) and of course the text and image based content was a slow and ever evolving process.
I was curious about how my process might intersect and mingle with memory, research and the challenges and shifting circumstances of my daily life.
While some of the poems and images in still had previous iterations, often as part of an artist bookwork, a video piece, a postcard project or an installation, I reconsidered and in some cases rebuilt them alongside pieces that were written, photographed or painted more recently once this process of physical thinking was underway.
I envisioned this piece as a gathering. The various images, poems and texts don’t appear chronologically but they also don’t take their place upon the pages randomly. When context shifts, often so does meaning. And I was interested in how the various pieces related and played off each other across spines, over pages and between the covers of this bookwork … how proximity, positioning and layering as well, might also shift a reading.
The following are some of the facing pages within still.
The bookwork’s dimensions are approximately 47 cm (H) X 31.75 cm (W), when the bookwork is closed. So when the bookwork is open, the span of the facing pages is 47 cm (H) X 63.5 cm (W).