While you’re there, you also need to visit Shelly’s gallery, where you will spend some happy time drooling over her collages, altered books, doodles, and artist trading cards.  This is a mixed media artist with wide and varied skills!

Image: Cat Sidh

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Single needle chain stitch binding

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The Bonefolder spring 2009 is online

As I became involved with books, I began to study their history and forms. I discovered an ancient structure called the girdle book: prayer books worn by medieval monks, lashed to their belts, their girdles, so their prayers would always be at hand. I had a different vision. My girdle books would contain new objects of devotion, new prayers, contemplations. Girdles are binders, like notebooks, places to hold and keep stories, house ideas in structures that are used to push and mold the female figure into idealized and often unreal shapes. Working with the girdle form has been a process of healing; learning to love the femaleness of my body and be comfortable in my own skin.

Alongside the girdles, other garment books also have taken shape. I began to use baby clothing because their scale is workable for books, but their significance immediately became apparent. They became receptacles for my memories of childhood: idealized vs. painful. These pieces explore issues of childhood and motherhood. My own feelings about my infertility live in work created out of toddler dresses and baby rompers. Gloves and hand-shaped drying forms comprise another body of work that explores the hand as a most basic sign of human communication- a greeting, a warning, surrender and embrace are all communicated through hand gestures.

I use the language of clothing. Frozen and stiff, the garment becomes immobile, as if the wearer evaporated, leaving a only a shell. They become places. Enclosures. Upon opening, the ghost of the missing person still remains in the echo of the garment’s frozen shape. When opened what remains are fragments, small found objects and books nestled within. They are the distilled essence of the story, the one left behind by the “person” once living there. New homes for stories I collect.

Image info (top to bottom)

Batter My Heat: A Wall Street Valentine, 2008, Girdle, Acrylic, shredding money, pins, digital printing. 20 x 25 x 15. Text by John Donne

One Heart, 2004, 14 x 17 x 9, girdle, acrylic, silk, indian hand made paper. Inset hand-shaped book, combination codex/accordion, 6 x 4 x 24 long when opened. Text by Emily Dickinson, Poem number 6, from Part One: Life

Hands of Josephus: Part 2, 2008, 10.5 x 4 x 28, altered text from Josephus: History of the Jews, beads, wire hand forms

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Book artist: Miriam Schaer

100 Things to Enjoy is a 50 page accordion book drawn in pencil and colored with Prismacolor on 150 lb. cold press paper. The total length when displayed is 50′. Each drawing represents essence of a particular moment or concept.

I love Pete’s bright and whimsical style!

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Book artist: Pete Ippel

My story is one of blessings in disguise…back in 1992, upon graduating from Arizona State University School of Architecture and Design, I took off on an adventure through Europe…5 months into the journey I had my backpack stolen in the train station in Rome. My friend, Cristiano chased the young boy through the crowd to no avail! Gone were my camera, walkman, passport, money, plane ticket and several rolls of film I’d shot along the way…but most devastating was the loss of my journal!

Days later, in Venice, I was talking with a street artisan and lamenting the loss of that journal….he responded by leading me down a little alley to his friend’s bookbinding shop where I laid eyes on books that truly called to me, and I was completely seduced! The Italian bookbinder and I became fast friends and he shared his passion for bookbinding with me….at the time it just seemed like a wonderful experience to tell my grandchildren about someday…..but about a year later when I needed a new journal I recalled those days in Venice and created one similar to the ones I’d been shown. Everywhere I went with that book people asked me to make one for them…thus, the beginning of Iona Handcrafted Books. The craftsmanship I learned in design school ( staying up ’til 3am building foamcore models ) paid off in my bookbinding endeavors.

I started selling my journals at a little parking lot show called the Fremont Sunday Market in Seattle rain or shine, at a little table with a big umbrella…..my books and I were received with much enthusiasm!

Now, more than 14 years after making that first book, here I am in Austin,Texas…a long way from Venice, Italy. East Austin is wonderful! I am working out of an old bread factory surrounded by amazing creativity…artists, musicians, film makers everywhere you turn…an inspiring time and place to be an artisan …..and if not for that little gypsy boy in Italy, who knows where I’d be…….

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Book artist: Mychal Mitchell

Art and creativity have always been a presence in Jennifer Star’s life. The very foundation of her creativity and artistic expression is based on a spiritual relationship with the earth and universe, and a desire to share this with others.   She has found that healing of the body/mind/ spirit occurs every time she fills herself up with ‘creative food for the soul.’

Bookmaking has been creative food for Star’s soul for as long as she can remember. However, it wasn’t until the early 2000’s that she was introduced to the technical side of bookmaking. From there her structural ability blossomed and she began dabbling in many forms of bindings, altered books, and artist books. Her deep love is in making blank journals – some with highly decorated covers, others left plain so that the owner can decorate it themselves. The following phrase, found on one of Star’s personal collage journals, expresses her sentiment about handmade books: “Something so precious is worth
protecting.”

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Book artist: Jennifer Star

Book Arts Links

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Book arts links from our archives!

My experience as an artist has led me to this ever-evolving journey into the world of magical books and mysterious boxes. I create artists’ books that are sometimes sculptures, sometimes puzzles and other times found object art. I like to take the viewer on on a journey full of twists and turns. My books may contain boxes with tinier books inside or be filled with cubbyholes that hold secret, oddly shaped, miniature books. My style is intricate and finely crafted, with a touch of whimsy. I use my own handmade or handpainted papers exclusively in my work.

In book arts I have found a 3-dimensional medium that allows me to express my style in a way that resonates deeply with me. I feel like I’m home within the medium of book arts.

I have studied with renowned book artists Hedi Kyle, Dolph Smith and Gillian Boal. Each year I attend the Paper and Book Intensive to hone my skills. The Evergreen State College has acquired two of my artists’ book for their Rare Books Room collection. My book, Ocean Passports, received an Honorable Mention at this year’s Capitol City Visual Arts Exhibit at the Minnaert Center for the Arts in Olympia, WA. I also teach paper arts and book arts from my studio and at western Washington art centers.

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Book artist: Randi Parkhurst

Artist: Lesley Riley
Website: LaLasLand
Blog: LesleyRiley

After years of putting down a book to pick up my art, or setting aside my art to lose myself in the pages of a book, I finally found peace by making the book my art. I use fabric, my primary medium of expression, to create tactile and textured hand-made and altered books.

Fabric is the key ingredient in my hand-made books for a variety of reasons. Fabric not only adds texture, color and pattern, but evokes memory and meaning. It is a familiar medium that everyone can relate to. The fabrics I use in my books are carefully selected to suggest, enhance or even tell the story. When I cannot find the right fabric, I create it.

The word ‘textile’ is a Latin word originating from the word ‘texere’ which means ‘to weave. I am intrigued by the relationship between text and textile. I am currently stepping off the page and out of the book to focus on creating my own fabrics that tell a story.

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Book artist: Lesley Riley

Artist: Tamar Stone
Website: Art of Tamar Stone

My artist books that tell the stories of women’s lives that have been constricted by their various situations throughout history. As an artist bookmaker, the stories unfold in a non-traditional way via pages that are pieces of corsets, or layers of a bed. However, I consider these non-traditional forms of the book, still a book that tells a story in a narrative way with the viewer having the opportunity interact with the pages of the books, a hands-on tactile experience with the embroidered words and printed images on vintage materials.

The definition of a book has a wide interpretation and I believe this has to do with the layers of pages in which any narrative unfolds as well as being connected by a traditional spine – with the corset books, the spine in this case is something built into what is instrumental about corseting.

Although not popular in these days of “immediate gratification,” my work requires the viewer to slow down and undo the book; untying the “book” via the corset laces or folding back the bedcovers, and reading the text. This is part of the contemplation and therapy of the process, echoing what women have been experiencing for a century of dressing and in the case of the beds – housekeeping.

General Corset Books background:
Inspired by my own experiences, my books capture moments in women’s lives when issues of appearance, self esteem and assimilation become paramount due to physical restrictions placed on the body, either by fashion or by medical necessity.

My interest in womens’ body/image has come about because during the 1970’s, for 6 years, from the ages of 13-18, I wore a brace 23 hours a day to correct my spinal curvature (Scoliosis). In 1984 I again found myself in a corset/brace for a herniated disk made by the same man who made my earlier brace and who made the buckle straps for my 2nd paper book, “to exert…as oneself”. Through all of this, I developed sensitivity to “correction” and the need to fit in. In my early paper books I talked about feelings of isolation and body issues. I used sheer materials (vellum and acetate), with repeating text and pictures, layering and stripping away at words and images. Visual and literal puns emerge, involving structure, apparent and concealed.

The corset books evolved because I wanted to continue to use overlapping text, but I wanted the text to be more tactile, using antique corsets to tell the stories of women being confined and defined by their supporting clothing. By using embroidery, I feel the text is literally coming out from the textile – so that the fabric is telling the story. The stories that are stitched into these vintage textiles incorporate text from the behavioral manuals of various historical periods, which describe prescriptions of public and private deportment, as well as personal narratives of modern women who have lived with these physical constraints. These same texts and relationships inform my corset books as I create a resonance with the rules and perceptions, which have been confining and defining women’s postures.

These corset books are a continuation of my expressions and pay homage to understructures, which have voluntarily or involuntarily supported and corrected women throughout history.

General Bed Books background:
The more I read about women’s lives being constricted by their clothes and social mores, combined with the fact that I have an interest in the history of housework, the more I became interested in what was happening to women in their homes and how at times they had become prisoners within their own “upholstered cages” (a description used for many homes).

Because women have always been associated with the home, hearth and all the domestic duties that belong to them, this bed project is about memories and moments that are attached to specific objects within our homes—specifically beds.

Historically our life cycle begins and ends in the bed from being born in a bed, and then dying
in one. It used to be that many of our life cycle events (birth, sickness, death) occurred at home in our beds.. In the second half of the 20th century so much of our lives have been taken out of the home and moved to places where we become handled by specialists i.e. the hospital bed or any other specialized institution – away from the family, where we are now managed by professionals.

As children we used the bed as an impromptu trampoline or tent and as we got older, it became the place in which intimacies are shared with significant others.

I realize that these things have been shared by both men and women but since women tend to be the primary housekeeper of the home (long considered the center of family life), this project focuses on girls and women, and their thoughts told in stories centered around their beds.

It is because of these domestic associations that in order to read these intimate stories the reader must unmake each bed, pulling back the covers to turn the “pages.” In order to close the book, one must re-make the bed, mimicking the actions of women’s housework that have been done for centuries. In order to create a more intimate experience, these stories are told with the use of vintage doll beds and salesman sample beds.

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Book artist: Tamar Stone