System Theory
Stephanie Gibbs
System Theory purchase (ships 6/15/2022)
process notes after description | video of volume 2
“We commonly think of animals and plants as matter, but they are really systems through which matter is continually passing.” — William Bateson
Two volume artist’s book in clamshell box. A study of lichen as a system, and of society as a system: a lens for examining how the organism requires thinking and acting beyond the immediate needs of the individual.
Hand painted wood veneer covers [designs vary], 6 hand embroidered pages, 8 woodcut prints, 6 woodcut collages digitally printed on fabric, and two essays: Twelve Readings on the Lichen Thallus by Trevor Goward, and A System of Logic by John Stuart Mill, with historic lichen imagery. The hand-embroidered pages are the text from the Sociology entry of The Encyclopaedia Britannica 11th edition, which describes society as a organism working towards the health of the whole over the desires of the individual.
9"x 9". Edition of 10. Two volumes in clamshell box. Ships 6/15/2022. $4,250
In the early autumn of 2021, I became fascinated by the unresolved nature of the definition of lichen: how it is a combination of algae and fungus; how it forms a third, completely different organism than would be possible without this combination; how science is still flummoxed by aspects of it: is it an organism? Is it mostly a fungus? Is it a parasite? Is it mutually beneficial? I was interested in their variety and their functionality: the time scale they operate in, by the climates they grow in, how they display interdependence into a new whole.
Different scientists have different interpretations, as it was only at the invention of more powerful microscopes in the late 18th century that Erik Acharius teased out the constituent parts. One of the books about lichen that I most enjoyed was Kem Luther’s “Boundary Layer,” which includes a reference to the work of Canadian scientist Trevor Goward, author of a series of essays entitled Twelve Readings on the Lichen Thallus. These personal essays combine science with storytelling to explore the nature of lichens, and conclude that they can best be experienced as systems rather than as individual parts acting in self interest. Trevor Goward very kindly gave me permission to reprint his essays, which I abridged to tell the story of a system formed of interdependent parts.
This led me to start searching for other metaphors that explored the nature of systems: what would make lichen something that other people could conceptualize, who weren’t already knowledgeable? What would make lichen larger than a biological curiosity? I started looking into other examples of networks and systems: neuroscience, brain theory and the nervous system; transportation hubs; samples of manufacturing; and then came across John Stuart Mill’s book which established social science, A System of Logic. There is a chapter that applies logical thinking to the study of human rights and society — in short, the establishment of sociology as a field — the study of humanity and politics as a system rather than as individual actors.
The rest of the creation process formed around combining these elements in a unity representing both the biology of lichens and the science of society, telling both narratives concurrently without causing information overload or blurring the essential nature of each subject. The creation and construction of the artist’s book is a combination of form and function to explore the narrative of systems being more than their individual components.
The text of the book is the abridged essays by Goward; the borders of the pages have the abridged text of Stuart Mill. Throughout the book, imagery from the early scientists has been brought into the page designs: the botanical illustrations of Acharius, Nageli, and Westrings.
The three disparate elements of volume one mirror the nature of lichen [algae, fungus, cyanobacteria; Goward, Stuart Mills, historic botanical plates], brought into a different tri-part format in volume two: hand-embroidered text, woodblock prints, and digital collages.
Volume two uses a more poetic exploration of the visual nature of lichen, with the most laborious and slow-growing method of creating text on the page that is possible — hand embroidery. This outcome was inspired both by the long tradition of embroidered book covers and more directly by the fabric books of Louise Bourgeois for inspiration in how cloth could work as a book structure. [New York Times | MoMA [original] | [edition] ]
The text literally grows on the substrate, the way lichen grows on trees and rocks; and it is slow, slower even than calligraphy or using handset type: it operates at the scale that lichen grows. I had a copy of the famous Encyclopaedia Britannica 11th Edition, and the article on Sociology echoes the message of volume one:
It is a feature of organisms that as we rise in the scale of life the meaning of the present life of the organism is to an increasing degree subordinate to the larger meaning of its life as a whole. The efficiency of an organism must always be greater than the total of its members acting as individuals.
I extracted a total of six excerpts from the text, which illustrate this concept of the sum being greater than the parts.
I was interested in incorporating a woodgrain print element to the project, based on the photograph from the nature hike [above] with the lichen growing on a felled trunk. A Canadian woodworkers forum described sanding the wood smooth and then using a wire brush drill attachment to pull out the soft grain to raise the grain, so that the rings would form prints. My studio was partitioned into a special sanding area (plastic cloths hanging from the ceiling) and sanding and wire-brushing commenced.
These sanded blocks were then turned into rubbings using graphite on paper, then dropped into Photoshop, and digital collages were made using the rubbings and the hand-dyed covers [see below]. The resulting collages were digitally printed onto organic cotton, which was dyed in the studio in a bath of acorn dye [acorns collected by my nephews], and cut down into panels for the books.
The embroidered panes and digital collages were trimmed with a rough edge, formed into signatures with a second embroidered panel and collage, and the outer edges hand-stitched.
Bringing the woodcut element into sharper relief, inked woodblock prints were created by printmaker Catherine Ulitsky, who accompanied me on the lichen walk through the Hawley Bog pictured earlier. In addition to being a trained professional printmaker, Catherine also has a long history of interest in the natural environment and our relationship with it, and her selections of woodblocks and thoughtful inking bring a sharp visual focal point into the edition, providing a foundation for the embroidery and collages to grow in relation to.
The covers of the books are maple veneer panels, hand dyed in a range of colors and patterns to resemble the various palettes and forms that lichen takes, on trees and on stones. Each cover is different; while the covers of volume one and volume two are in relationship to each other as far as tone, it was never the intention to have them match or coordinate. Nature is too diverse for me to be interested in that as a solution. A selection of these panels were used as a base and color layer for the digital collages of volume two.
The same way that lichen is a relationship between disparate elements that forms a complex, functional system, this book incorporated the skills and talents of a group of people that I am thrilled were graciously involved in the project. Without Trevor Goward’s essay, Catherine Ulitsky’s woodblock prints, and the talented handcraft of my studio assistant, Kayla Mattes, this project would not have unified into the whole presentation that it offers the reader.