studio news

Field Guide

February 23, 2022Stephanie Gibbs

Field Guide is a two volume artist's book edition that traces mankind's fractured relationship with nature, stemming from our difficulty in recognizing that we are, in fact, a part of nature.

production notes below description

I shall collect plants and fossils, and with the best of instruments make astronomic observations.

Yet this is not the main purpose of my journey.

I shall endeavor to find out how nature’s forces act upon one another, and in what manner the geographic environment exerts its influence on animals and plants.

In short, I must find out about the harmony in nature.

— Alexander von Humboldt

Volume 1, Field Guide, has the abridged text of Man, A Machine, written by Julien Offray de La Mettrie in 1747, and a thorough range of historic skeleton illustrations, presented in the order of the traditional "evolutionary tree of life" that has biology reaching its pinnacle in modern day human beings. It is covered in rabbit fur (various patterns).

Volume 2, Field Guide to the Anthropocene, uses historic Field Guides covering a range of topics, to depict visually how humans have continued to insist on describing the natural world through how it specifically affects humans; it is also organized internally in the same order as Volume 1, starting with plants and ending with human beings (and war). The cover material is a camouflage fabric.

The pages of both volumes were digitally printed, then hand dyed using tea, walnut husks, and hibiscus flowers. Edges painted. Titles engraved on brass tags, mounted into front covers.

Limited edition of 15. Two volumes in clamshell box. 2019/2021.

Work on this project started in the spring of 2019. Do you remember those heady early spring days? I was just about to depart for Seattle, and in the planning stages of a trip to Japan (Seattle was full of delicious pastries, Japan is still in the future).
At the time, I had two fuzzy cats, Ferdinand and Charlie. Now, I have two tuxedo cats, Ezra and Vincent. Obviously, other things have happened in the intervening two and a half years, which accounts for why it has taken said amount of time to finish this edition, but let’s just spend a moment admiring the cats.

The entire project was undertaken because I wondered — how do you cover a book in fur? Whenever I see a book as a prop in a film, I’m filled with [occasionally irrational] envy that I was not the person who made that prop, and I want to have the skill set to be able to do literally anything that a prop master requests, regardless of whether it’s a thing that I’ve done before or not. And that Harry Potter book really made me want to know … how do you do that? There aren’t any bookbinding how to manuals that really go into working with weird materials, but I’ve never let that stop me before — even back in graduate school, I used a rattlesnake skin on an artist’s book just because I wanted to see how it would work (it worked).

In order to figure out how to even work with fur, I ended up using the extensive tailoring collection at the LAPL — books published in the 1930s and 1940s that provided directions on how working with fur is different from working with leather or cloth. While there are significant differences between a goatskin that has been tanned specifically for use in bookbinding and fur for the clothing trade, it was at least a starting point for how the material behaved and what types of technical issues would need to be addressed.

Oddly enough, in one of those moments of synchronicity that make you wonder if the universe is paying a bit too much attention, as these books were nearing final completion, the New Yorker published an article about Margaret Wise Brown, and discussed how she had enough clout with her publishers to insist that the first run of Little Fur Families be covered in rabbit skin, with later editions in fake fur. I had spent two years looking for examples of fur in bookbinding, and suddenly, here was one, unexpectedly. Unfortunately, the first editions were missing from both the LAPL and UCLA special collections, and the other library copies are in traditional laminated covers, but the Beverly Hills public library had a copy of a recent fake fur edition, which was at least something to study to see how the internal structure and turn-ins were handled.

Once I had worked through enough of the technical issues regarding the material, I began to think about this as an artist’s book edition. If I wanted to cover a book in fur, what should the content be?

Obviously, the content should be bones.

After I had amassed a geological quarry’s worth of skeletons, I started thinking about the text. I wanted … a bone identification guide? An excavation guide? A field guide? The more I looked into field guides, the more I realized that a field guide of field guides was a fascinating lens through which to tell the story of how mankind has defined the natural world around the needs of humanity. So while looking for text for volume one (bones), I inadvertently created volume two (field guide of field guides).

This still left me with the question of how to give the skeletons context, so I started reading natural history and philosophy concerning the ability of humanity to see itself as separate from all other aspects of creations. This belief stems from the very first chapters of Genesis, where it is declared that man was created in god’s own image, and has led to millennia of exploitation of natural resources and cruelty to animals (and women, who were seen as closer to animals than to men). (Even today I’ve met [had first but not second dates with] people who believe that humans are somehow more than other animals.) In doing this reading, I came across the essay Man, A Machine, by the French philosopher Julien Offray de La Mettrie, writing in the 18th century that, nope, we’re just functional organisms like everything else. He was excommunicated for this. I loved this essay, and the writing style, but in abridging it for this project, I removed most of what he had to say about the intellectual powers of women. (He was on the right track, but it was still the 18th century, and women were still property.)

Now that I had the collection of skeletons, the essay, and the collection of Field Guides, I started working on page layouts for the text. The skeletons are arranged in the order of the traditional “tree of evolution,” which sees, as its pinnacle, the development of modern mankind.

The skeletons face the inner margin, with the text swimming around the outer margins, and evolve from fish to birds to mammals to apes to humans.

In the second volume, the Field Guides start with plants, then works through the same order as the skeletons — fish, birds, mammals, humans — ending with that most human of creations, war.

I experimented with different page color backgrounds, and settled on tea-dying the pages as a way to bring texture into the digital printing.

time passed

To begin the process of dying the pages, strong tea was made, and the pages were dipped for about a minute and then line dried.

After they had dried, there still just wasn’t quite enough texture to the paper surface, so I experimented with other types of dyes.

Using a speckled effect in walnut husk and hibiscus provided the level of visual softening that I was looking for.

After the pages were dyed, speckled, dried, pressed, and trimmed, the edges were painted a dull gold that adds more visual texture rather than shine.

Which brought me back to the process that started it all — covering the books with fur. It really isn’t like working with leather. For a lot of the process, you’re working just by feel — because the fur obscures everything that the skin is doing. While my techniques were informed by my research and previous experiments, they were, honestly, also informed by growing up in Dallas in the 1980s. Let’s just say that I hadn’t bought hair spray since I was in high school, and some of the turn-in trimming techniques owe more to the concept of the Flowbee than to any bookbinding techniques.

The engraved brass name tags were the result of wondering how to attach a title to fur, my previously experiments therein being lackluster, but it was resolved through a lifetime of having fuzzy feline companions. The hand-stamped unevenness that the dog supplier produced I found charming and in keeping with the feel of the book.

And so the edition is completed [the clamshell boxes are still in process]. I feel it is important to note that I did strongly consider using imitation fur for this edition: while this book’s nickname has definitely been the hunter and the wabbit, I’m very aware of the ethical and environmental issues associated with the use of fur. I live in a state where SB-5 strictly regulates the sale and use of fur. While I’m not a vegetarian — while I use goat and calf frequently in my bookbinding practice — there is a definite ick factor that happens simultaneously with the ooo fuzzy reaction. I think this is important. I want readers to be equally fascinated and appalled: that is the crux of the anthropocene, a world that we’ve created in our own image, that is slowly destroying our ability to continue to survive.

across the seas

January 04, 2022Stephanie Gibbs

The holiday edition was completed and set sail at the end of the New Year weekend — bringing, hopefully, tranquil seas as we enter 2022. This past year was … intense. There really aren’t that many other ways to describe it. On a global scale, we had tiktok sea shanties, the Ever Given canal blockage, the backups at the Port of Long Beach, and, apparently, the Gulf of Mexico caught on fire. I didn’t even realize that last one until getting ready to write this essay.

On a personal scale, I watched the Pirates of the Caribbean, and had a brief moment of wondering if my brother had been kidnapped by pirates in the Indian Ocean (outcome: it was a pocket dial, not a ransom call). We were allowed to travel, then we were advised to reconsider those travel plans. We ended up more or less where we began, except time passed, turbulent and storm-tossed.

So, obviously, this year’s card was always going to be about the sea.

From a technical standpoint, my printing company acquired a digital die cutter a couple of years ago, and I’d been curious about its capabilities. When my brain hears “die cutting”, it immediately throws out “POP UP BOOKS.” So I knew early on that there was going to be a pop-up element to the card. I hadn’t previously used the cut-and-fold accordion book technique for the holiday edition, although I’ll frequently use it for other occasions; I like that it allows a book to be made from a single sheet of paper, and that the numerous mountain and valley folds would accommodate the pop-up elements that I wanted to incorporate.

The structure of the cards references back to a similar approach that I took for the 2006/2007 edition — which was before I posted photos of the process of making the cards; I had only started making them in graduate school, 2003/2004. (There’s also a resemblance to the 2011/2012 “year of fog,” using a photo collage gradient with poem overlay, on an accordion book.) It’s fascinating to look back and see both how I was thinking about structures, and how they’ve developed and matured. (They’ve also gotten a lot more time-intensive and expensive to create, produce, and mail.)

The Poetry Foundation has a marvelous database of contemporary and historic poems; I did some searching along the lines of “journey,” “ocean,” “ship,” and was utterly charmed by a recent translation and compilation of Socrates’ “The Sea”. I’ve been in Los Angeles long enough that, even though I only make it to the beach once or maybe twice a year, I have plenty of photos of the changing colors of the water, and I decided to lean into being that person who sends pictures of the beach to friends shoveling snow in colder climates. In 2020, I restored a book of maps (Munstero’s Cosmographiae) from the 1550s, and, at the time, took note of the number of ships and sea monsters that were depicted scattered across the oceans. (In a news article that isn’t about catastrophe, the Smithsonian published a piece this year about the excavation of a ship from this era.) (Here’s another, from Vanity Fair, with fights over sunken treasure!)

At this point, I had: the text; a collection of photos of the sea; a collection of images of ships and sea monsters; historic maps. I dropped everything into InDesign, and arranged the photos to run chronologically from morning light to late afternoon, and aligned all the horizons. The text, which runs across the skies, had page breaks put in which effectively mirror the shapes of waves — a spread has more lines, then progressively fewer, then increases again. This is subtle, but I wanted a sense of motion in the reading of the text itself. The orientation of the ships, fish, and monsters was shifted around, putting each element in play with the other elements and with the text. As the triangles that separate each section are both hidden and visible, and since this is a book about the sea, I treated them as wave forms, and filled the space with ocean. Then I had to learn how to incorporate die cutting marks into the file; while I didn’t end up using the digital die cutting machine (it tore the paper when there were sharp turns), I’m glad that I went through the process of learning how to set up the files.

Once the printed pages were in the studio, I could start the process of assembly. The first step was to manually create what the digital die cutting wasn’t able to accomplish; I set up a jig to punch holes at the beginning and end of each outline, since part of a successful pop-up function is that the cuts are as parallel to each other as possible (otherwise the element opens at an angle). Then the outlines were freehand cut around each illustration.

After all of the outlines were cut, the page, still whole, was folded along the mountain folds. When the pages were then folded for the valley folds, the pop-ups were encouraged to fold into the opposite direction from the parent sheet.

After the sheets were folded vertically, the horizontal cuts, separating the pages from each other, followed along the dividing line of the images. At the end of each row, a 45 degree fold and turn were incorporated, to allow the book to both twist and then remain in a single plane. A larger hole was punched at this juncture point, to accommodate the movement.

The books were then folded up into compact 2” squares, and placed in the press to set all the creases.

I was originally going to typeset “best wishes for 2022” in the same font as the text, but “2022” is difficult to typeset: it’s inelegant on the page. I tried several different fonts, then realized that my own handwriting would allow me to adjust the spacing of the numbers more precisely. Even here, I shifted the alignment a bit in Photoshop before having the stamping dies made. The pastedown is foil stamped onto Twinrocker paper, then tabbed onto the last page of the book.

The covers are a gray Twinrocker paper, the ship woodblock illustration on the front stamped with a pewter foil — the exterior of the book is a ship at moonlight, enclosing the progress of the day within.

By this time I was ready to be done with the cards and just wrap them with a paper belt as in previous years, but, well, there’s a point where you’ve done so much work, that there’s no reason not to just keep doing more. Vintage ribbons were used for the foredge ties; however, being vintage, there wasn’t enough of any one color for the full edition, so some are gray and some are blue.

In the spirit of “nature abhors a vacuum,” I was never going to leave the reverse of the card blank. The concept of a map element on the reverse featured in the 2019/2020 cards, although here they are more formally designed. The Cosmographiae had a number of charming maps to choose from; while I was tempted by the new world, I decided the whole world (Typus Orbis Universalis) was a better depiction of current events. The original map was then populated with all of the various ships, islands, and land creatures from throughout the original book’s text and other maps; my darlings were added to Nova Scotia, and I dropped myself in as a sea monster in the Caribbean. When the text of the book is opened out and flattened from the cover, the map can be read.

Since at this point I was leaning hard into “why stop now,” the card then received custom envelopes. Going through my various reference books on how-to-fold, the square that opens into a flower matched the emotional feel of the book; it’s larger than the books, to accommodate the thickness, and has a more modern aesthetic — a crisp encapsulation of the more flamboyant interior.

Wishing you the very best in the year ahead: a tranquil harbor, a warm sun, a cool drink.

entering the field

June 29, 2021Stephanie Gibbs

One of the most common emails that I receive is an inquiry about where and how to learn bookbinding, or book conservation. I have a set response that I will post here: however, please be aware that this field is an interconnected web of skills and training, and that certain training programs will focus on certain aspects that others will not. This is not intended to be an exhaustive guide, but provides a starting point for further research and exploration.

In my own studio, I do not use unpaid interns, and only hire assistants with studio experience [application here]. Private lessons are available; however, these are most suitable for practicing artists, advanced undergraduates / graduate students, and those interested in applying to art or conservation programs.

Bookbinding and book conservation, as practiced in the United States and England, are generally regarded as separate professional fields. I wrote a paper about this in graduate school; I’m not going to delve into the details here.

If you are interested in a professional career working in a library or museum collection as a conservator, you will need an accredited MA degree specializing in conservation of books and/or paper. Please be aware that MA degrees do not teach basic bookbinding: this is a skill set that they expect students to bring with them into the program. MA programs lean heavily into chemistry, decision making and evaluation, preservation, bibliographic history, ethics, and conservation treatment and materials decisions. Which schools are offering MA training in conservation varies from year to year as funding, staffing, and grants are unstable. These programs are very competitive. For professional training, you’ll have to do a preprogram internship (Getty, Library of Congress, etc) before applying; the internships are also competitive and students are expected to have some working knowledge of the field through workshops and other coursework. Internships are posted in the autumn and winter for summer availability. Internships are available at various museums and research libraries, but many have been postponed due to the Covid-19 health situation.

If you are interested in a career as an edition binder, you will need the same basic bookbinding skills as for entrance into an MA program; however, you will cobble together the skills and context for edition binding through a combination of short courses, MFA or BFA programs, conferences, apprenticeships, and other informal routes. Please note that while many edition binders know the fundamentals of letterpress printing, this is generally considered a separate professional field, and there is rarely in-studio overlap of the practices. Likewise, the skills of paper making, marbling, printmaking and screenprinting are transferable but not actively incorporated into edition work. As with conservation programs, the universities and colleges offering MFA and BFA programs have a tendency to change as staff retire or funding is reallocated.

For training opportunities, research:

Be aware that it will take several years before you qualify for a masters program, and it is important to find diverse training centers for short courses beforehand. Academic training in book history, in addition to workshops in handskills, will also be helpful in applying to graduate programs.

Some commercial binderies offer training to staff, but they tend to pay minimum wage and are not considered professional training.

See the book arts web ( https://www.philobiblon.com/ ) and the American Institute for Conservation ( https://www.culturalheritage.org/ ) for further leads.

a year of liminal spaces

December 07, 2020Stephanie Gibbs

It’s December, 2020. The election happened. That it was as close as it was is heartbreaking. That baby steps are being taken to resume civil society is heartening, but it shouldn’t have to be. This past year has been one of feeling caught in the in-betweens; stagnant, anxious, and unable to focus. I’m slowly regaining my concentration, and with it my equanimity, but for many months there have been both too many moments while somehow never quite enough time. In the uncertain days of October, I channeled my anxiety into the holiday edition, which makes this year’s the earliest completion ever.

the holiday edition 2020-2021: The Time-Being

2020 marked my five-years-in-Los-Angeles anniversary, and the traditional gift for this milestone is wood. Hiromi Paper carries a stock of paper-wood (wood veneer) products, and I’d been curious about using them for printing and foil stamping, so this year’s edition started with the desire to incorporate wood in some format.

As I cycled through the maelstrom of the year, I struggled to anchor in the present tense. It’s a difficult task for me at the best of times; I tend to live three steps in the future, and suddenly the future was too foreign, and the present too fraught. One of the books I read this year introduced me to the Buddhist philosophy of time as linked moments, rather than a progression, as explored by the Zen Buddhist teacher Dogen in his essay on Being-Time. This was a useful reminder, to value the present moment as a moment, rather than looking at either the moments that didn’t happen, or the moments that have not yet happened. I really liked the translation by Thomas Cleary, but the one by Dan Welch and Kazuaki Tanahashi is a bit easier to parse.

Do not think that time merely flies away. Do not see flying away as the only function of time. If time merely flies away, you would be separated from time.
In essence, all things in the entire world are linked with one another as moments. Because all moments are the time-being, they are your time-being.

And:

Practice-enlightenment is time. Being splattered with mud and getting wet with water is also time.

At this point, I had the material (wood veneer) and the text (Being-Time), and I started to think about format. Knowing that this year’s text was from Buddhist philosophy and has a rigid material as the substrate, the format of the palm leaf book was immediately apparent as being most appropriate. Palm leaf books are traditional to southern Asian religious texts, and often incorporate calligraphy with small ornamental flourishes; there are some great tutorials online: I especially liked this one from the University of Iowa. Additionally, an early western essay was available from JSTOR, which provided a interesting look at the bibliographic interpretation of the format in the west. That my adopted city of Los Angeles is awash in palm trees adds to the appropriate nature of this format.

After printing a test run on my laser printer at home, I was happy with the proof of concept, but struggled with legibility of the text. Many of the original manuscripts have etched lines guiding the calligraphy, so I added a thin line on the staves to assist with reading. Likewise, I liked the decorative elements around the sewing holes, and incorporated medieval heraldry imagery as a foil stamped element for the sewing stations.

The text had a tendency to rub off of the paperwood, so I did three tests with different fixatives: PVA size, matte medium, and klucel-g (a conservation consolidant). They helped fill in the grain of the wood, but then needed to be buffed with sandpaper and steel wool. And then they actually printed even less well on my home printer: thankfully they printed beautifully on commercial printers.

After printing, the sewing stations were stamped in red foil; then the paperwood was backed with a decorative Japanese paper. They were then punched for sewing, then cut into individual staves.

I wasn’t sure what type of sewing method would be the most stable; after a few tests, knotting the thread between each stave helped keep everything in alignment. While I liked the frivolous nature of the gold thread, it was significantly more brittle than the red thread, and tended to break during the sewing process. Looping the ends as an extension at the top allows the books to be hung, as a broadside.

And so, folded against themselves, wrapped, and posted, they fly into the final days of what has been a year of turmoil, and a year for trying to hold onto the smallest of moments, of catching my breath and breathing deeply, in and through the uncertainty of what has been and what will be.

Coda. This rather summarizes the year: an upside-down pane, noticed two days after the cards were mailed. How many were affected? Who are the recipients of this bibliographic irregularity (and hopefully rarity)? When I say my concentration has been shattered to pieces, this neatly encapsulates the result...

this year, it's virtual

October 27, 2020Stephanie Gibbs

While I am the first person to admit that I don't remotely enjoy the performative aspects of art fairs, they are a useful benchmark for keeping track of the passage of time -- in my studio life, days run into days run into days, and I'm never quite sure if a week has passed, or six months, or three years. The Los Angeles Printer's Fair is a particularly sentimental occasion for me (rather than a particularly professional one), since it marks my anniversary of relocating to Los Angeles, and I'm extremely grateful for the landing pad that the International Printing Museum provided upon my arrival. Since fairs aren't happening this year, the LAPF2020 is being held virtually, and I agreed to make a series of short videos as part of their multimedia presentation.

My preferences for technologies are for the outdated and the obsolete; while I'm not a Luddite, I'm also not a technophile. They offered to lend me a professional videographer for the project, but since I closed my studio to the public seven (?!?!?!?) months ago, it didn't seem appropriate to have someone in the space for an extended period of time, while I narrated sans mask. As a result, I cobbled together a narrated series of instructions using my phone and the software on my laptop.

You'll notice that: my hands look exceptionally awful, even by my standards. They're covered in burns from foil stamping, and they're covered in scratches from PandemicKitten™ Vincent. Also, these particular structures are (a) the ones that I generally teach in introductory workshops, and (b) ones I've used in recent Holiday Editions, so I had samples readily available. You'll also notice that I didn't use a pre-written script, and as I was recording the narrations, I was drinking wine. So there's a bit of narrative ... irregularity, repetitiveness, and inaccuracy. At no point do I actually go off the rails, which, to be honest, would have been more interesting.

The resulting four videos will appear wherever the LAPF multimedia extravaganza is being posted; presumably on all the usual sites. I don't know if they'll ask me to provide additional content to help fill space. Nature abhors a vacuum, but I would also argue that people abhor amateur multimedia content. These were created with an audience of absolute beginners in mind, and feature such bookbinding materials as Glue Sticks and button thread.

Rather than drip them out one at a time, I'm posting all of them here, together, since that will make archiving them easier. They can also be found directly on youtube, here.

If you make something as a result of these instructions, please do send me a photo. I love seeing other people's projects!

Introduction

Cut and Fold Booklets

Accordion Books

Sewn Signature Pamphlets

Waterways

June 07, 2020Stephanie Gibbs

The Seattle Art Museum recently included my artist's book "Between, Among, Within" in an installation on climate change entitled John Akomfrah: Future History.

Notes from the Curator:

The installation, which we have been referring to as "The Vertigo Lounge," takes its name from Akomfrah's three-channel film, Vertigo Sea (2015), that explores the ocean's beauty in our current moment on the verge of climate crisis. In this installation, which is situated in the final gallery of the exhibition, we have included several artist's books that address or reference climate change, a book shelf of climate- and Akomfrah-related titles, a short film about the herring spawn in Sitka, AK, and an interactive element that encourages visitors to record their ideas about ways to save the planet.
The exhibition and installation opened in February, but was closed in March due to the coronavirus pandemic. In lieu of this, the curators of the Akomfrah exhibition are going to do a recorded presentation for SAM at the end of July. That link will be provided as it becomes available.

The museum requested that I provide additional information about the process of creating this book. The specific questions were:

Why did you decide to focus your work on water/water scarcity?
Tell us about the process of making Between, Among, Within. How did you decide on the images?
What do you want a reader to take away from the work?
Since the COVID 19 pandemic, have you thought about this work in a different way?

The following reflections are on the creation, intention, philosophy, and evolution of thinking as pertains to my artist’s book, Between, Among, Within, which was created in 2016 using new research and re-incorporating prior work.

Why did you decide to focus your work on water/water scarcity?

In all of the places that I have lived, I’ve been keenly interested in the interplay between systems for sustaining the delicate balance between human life and environmental balance. Water is a particularly noteworthy barometer for how humans view resources. Water, itself, cannot be created or destroyed. It evaporates; it forms clouds; it rains. It falls into the seas; it falls on land; it absorbs into aquifers. Humans dig wells, then dig deeper wells, then drill into aquifers, then use the water from aquifers without considering the recharging period for water to leech back into the underground system. In Texas, where I grew up, water is a privately owned commodity, like oil or stone. Entire towns in Massachusetts were in protracted legal fights with the Coca-Cola company about losing their water to bottling plants; inevitably, as corporations have deeper financial resources than small towns, the towns run out of money to continue to the fight. Internationally, the problem is even worse.

When I was living in Boston, the city was reconstructing Washington Blvd (which ran through my neighborhood): part of the public works project was replacing the original water pipes of the city, hollowed out logs. After I moved to western Massachusetts, I learned that all of the water consumed in Boston came from flooding several towns in the central part of the state in order to create the Quabbin Reservoir. Entire communities were destroyed, families forcefully relocated, and a public works flooding project engineered in order to provide for “the greater good.” They didn’t even de-construct the towns: when the water level in the reservoir drops, rooftops of the buildings can still be seen, and the original roads have been left as restricted access hiking paths. The politics of the use policies of the Quabbin were equally perplexing. No swimming, no kayaking, but motorboats were fine. Which is going to pollute public drinking water more: a gas powered motorboat or a hand powered canoe? Which has more political power: sportsmen or kayakers?

In 2015, I relocated my home and studio from rural western Massachusetts to central Los Angeles. The first thing that I noticed was how parched the air was: the pervasive dryness was a genuine shock. The state was coming off of a prolonged drought; the reservoirs were emptied or being cover in floating black balls to prevent evaporation; the city was aggressively paying residents to tear out water-hungry lawns and emphasize native, drought-tolerant plants. I felt guilty if it took longer than three minutes to shower. I washed dishes in as little water as possible. When working, I had to completely re-calculate the moisture content of my glue and working time. Projects dried faster, glue dried faster, paper was more brittle, leather reacted differently.

None of this should have been a surprise. I moved to California partly to be in a drier climate. I grew up in Texas, where summer temperatures regularly reach above a hundred, and I have childhood memories of summer droughts in Texas in the 1980s, with watering restrictions and fireworks regulations. I knew that Los Angeles was experiencing an historic drought; I knew that water levels in the Colorado River were so low that the river no longer flowed to the Pacific Ocean; I knew about arid climates and dry seasons. But knowing and experiencing are two entirely different things; I suddenly felt the lack of water, in a way I never had before. The situation in Los Angeles, an arid city reliant on water from the mountains, a city whose boundaries have been shaped with annexed land in order to secure water rights, has been illustrated in the movie “Chinatown,” which, while not a documentary, shows the extreme powers at play in the situation. I watched as the Silver Lake reservoir was emptied; as wealthy homeowners fought to have it re-filled instead of an empty concrete basin (“eyesore”); as a water-bottling company donated thousands of gallons of “expired” bottled water to refill the reservoir. This perverts the water cycle to: rainfall in the mountains; bottling by a private company; donation of water as an aesthetic accessory to wealthy neighborhoods.

And I live in an active earthquake zone. Through all this, I have approximately ten gallons of water squirreled away around my apartment. I check it annually and replace it every two years. I hope I never need to rely upon it. I’m terrified that I will.

Tell us about the process of making Between, Among, Within. How did you decide on the images?

The pastepapers were created in the summer of 2009 for an unrelated and uncompleted artist’s book edition about language and omission. Two editions of the pastepapers were made: indigo pigment in paste on white (machine, western) paper, and indigo pigment in paste on black Japanese paper. Both of these variations are represented in the final Between, Among, Within project. After finishing the prototype, the pastepapers were put into storage and the project languished.

When I began work on the project that became Between, Among, Within, I started by going through my archive of unused project pieces, and separating out those that I thought could be meaningfully re-imagined as new pieces. Looking over the pastepapers, I drew up a list of visual metaphors: flying buttresses, cathedrals, rivers, bridges. Then I began to look for imagery that magnified the interpretations of the patterns. I was thinking quite a lot about waterways, water rights, and rivers; discovering that the entire construction of the system to bring water to the city of New York from upstate had been photo-documented was exciting. I would have preferred to use images that more specifically related to a place that I lived; but I could not find comparable imagery for California, Texas, or Massachusetts.

The photographs were sourced from the New York Public Library historic photography collection, illustrating the construction of the water supply system to transport water from upstate (the Catskill Mountains) to the City in the early years of the twentieth century (1917/1928). What I liked about these photographs was not only the architectural shape of the scaffolding, tunnels, and bridges, but how much they emphasized the human element of the construction. There are men with shovels, men with rail cars, men working. The individual stories of these men have been lost to time: I doubt any statistics were kept as to how many men died working on the project. Presumably state records would indicate whether they were paid laborers or if prison work gangs were also used; what they were paid; how many hours per day and days per week they had to work. This was before the era of the union: and while the resulting structures may be both beautiful and useful, there is rarely an accounting of the human cost of the creation. As a bookbinder, I am deeply attuned to the presence of hand-work towards a completed product; as I consider the history of the industrial revolution and the changing attitudes towards “labor” and “work”, I look for the visible residue of human hands on construction projects of a massive scale.

The inclusion of a map showing the natural path of the waterway was equally integral to the project. Water flows from high elevations to lower elevations; water flows from the mountains to the sea. However, it does so in a pattern that, quite literally, meanders, creating oxbows, eddies, and rapids. The end result of the path may be the same, but the entire ecosystem and shape created by the will of the water is distinctly different. Nature has a path, and it is not the road of man.

The sine curve chosen for the cover stamping, in lieu of lettering the title, provides a geometrical metaphor for rising, falling, and cycling; not the movement of wave theory, but the back and forth as an equilibrium is sought.

What do you want a reader to take away from the work?

I do not have any particular expectations for the reader of the work. Some will find meaning in the shape of the pastepaper patterns; others will be fascinated by the photographs. Many readers miss the map component altogether. I would like the pastepapers to function as the connecting waterway through the construction of the systems, flowing the reader downstream, and providing pauses between the images for the mind to reset before it take on new information. I’d like the readers to think about pathways and to think about intentions, and to think about the layers of costs, human and environmental, of shaping nature and of supporting human life.

Since the COVID 19 pandemic, have you thought about this work in a different way?

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, and the racial justice protests that have accompanied it, I’ve been thinking about the distinctly American philosophies that underpin the way we treat our environment, the way we treat our fellow humans, and the role that we allow the government to play in enacting these beliefs. The complete re-routing of a watershed system across a state, an “inconvenience” to a few and a rebuilding of nature, was deemed essential by urban planners in the early twentieth century. There was no small amount of loss associated with destroying entire communities and changing the flow of rivers, but the need to support human life on a larger scale was deemed of higher importance. The system pictured in these photographs predates the 1918 flu,and the expansion of the system predates the 1930s depression; this serves as an indicator for what governments can accomplish when the will power exists. This was all done on a state level, with federal funds and support.

What I see now is a system where there is no political will to take care of the lifeblood of a population. There are National Guardsmen with machine guns posted underneath the windows of my studio. Last week the intersection under my windows was full of tactical police in riot gear rerouting peaceful protestors using aggressive means. I moved all of my clients’ work out of my studio and to my apartment because I’m terrified of arson. I’m also terrified of tear gas.

Now imagine a different outcome. Look at the political will that created lakes, that rerouted rivers, to provide water to cities across America. Imagine if instead of insufficient $1200 one-time allowances from the government, people were given an amount of money that actually covered the cost of rent. Imagine if instead of publicly traded companies scooping government loans, that money actually went to the many small businesses and independent contractors who have had difficulties getting their applications approved. Imagine if instead of billionaires and congressmen selling off stocks at the start of the pandemic that grocery store, warehouse, and slaughterhouse workers were paid not a minimum wage but a living wage. Imagine if in the middle of a major medical pandemic people’s health insurance wasn’t tied to their employer, as businesses are laying off employees and closing. Imagine if instead of police officers being funded to purchase military gear that medical workers had all the PPE they required to not die while saving lives.

We live in a country with great resources and great willpower. We have the ability to envision a different outcome, to plan the pathway to achieve that goal, and to put forth the effort for the vision to become a reality. Imagine if physical health, economic security, and racial justice was given the same importance as water.

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index of occasional thoughts

A Christmas In Scarlet

December 25, 2019Stephanie Gibbs

2019 was a year of whiplash: fantastic opportunities, and the corresponding riptides of life. Earlier this autumn, while listening to Decoder Ring, the following passage from a Sherlock Holmes novel struck home:

“My dear fellow,” said Sherlock Holmes as we sat on either side of the fire in his lodgings at Baker Street, “life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outré results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.”

The book is Arthur Conan Doyle's A Case of Identity; while listening to You're Dead to Me, I discovered that Sherlock Holmes was a part of the Victorian publishing Christmas rush. In fact, further research revealed that “Beeton’s Christmas Annual” published the first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet.

I had a collection of USGS Survey Maps of Southern California that had been CalArts library discards, and, after several years, they were finally flattened from their rolled storage state. I wanted to print the text as an accordion book on one side, and have the reader flying over the skyline on the other side, like Peter Pan and the children fly over the skies of London.

The skyline that I found is from St Nicholas Magazine in 1907, although the city itself isn't specified, so it can be whichever city the recipient wants it to be.

However, after putting together layouts in InDesign for an accordion book printed in two sections, 2-up on a 12"x18" layout, I discovered that I didn't have sufficient stock of USGS maps to use for the edition. So I called the LAPL map room, and they very kindly let me take freely from the discard pile. I took a very generous amount -- which ended up being the right decision, because the printer printed the first batch with the front page right side up, and the reverse upside down. There were plenty more maps to cut down; this is good, since there were also a fair number of registration issues: the machines didn't like the stock that the maps were produced on.

I knew that I wanted the covers to pick up on the colors of the USGS maps, and Hiromi Paper has a metallic range that is exactly the color of the landscape markings. And I wanted to bring a sense of the fantastic to the text, through a pastepaper pattern.

The acrylics were supposed to be burnt orange, to go with the warm copper tones of the covers and maps, but, due to the actual pigment color of the paint and the vast quantity of iridescent medium that I added, the color could more accurately be called "the blood of fairies."

The pastepaper pattern was pulled as a relief print: the maps were doused in a water bath, the pigment spread over a mirror, the maps placed over the pigment, then rubbed with a paint roller.

There was absolutely no consistency of pigment from print to print; some were gentle washes, and some were much more strongly colored. If this had been any other type of edition, I would have overpainted the gentle washes so that all the books were the same, but these are holiday cards, and the differences are part of their charm.

The edition of papers took up my studio floor and the hallway -- but this is, of course, what hallways are for. After drying and flattening the maps (and USGS maps are on great paper -- they took the water, painting, and drying process without a hitch, which was a relief after they were so difficult to print on), I decided to go ahead and fold them as an edition, even though the registration issues meant that each floated a bit on the page. As a result, the margins aren't perfect, but they are in close enough tolerances to work as an accordion book. The parent sheets were then cut down after folding.

Then the two parts of the accordion were glued together, with the overlap on the face of the page, rather than as an interruption of the skyline.

"The differences are part of the charm" is the same refrain that I repeated when I realized that my cover structure, where the turn-in forms the pastedown, would require more paper than I had actually purchased, so I ended up incorporating some silver paper from the same line that I had in the studio as the covers for some of the books.

The cover art is symbolism from a topography chart, that mirrors the design of a map compass: pointing you in a direction, despite the winds swirling in all directions.

Each recipient receives a slightly different landscape, and slightly differently colored paper -- as we each have our own path that we're following.

As a result of the number of pages in each book, they can be displayed as stars, not merely as a traditional accordion, a happy accident.

Wishing you a happy new year, and a safe and interesting journey!