About Story Objects
These pieces evolved out of Story Covers. After working inside the flat, reproducible format of the book cover for some time, I started thinking about why I was containing myself to the same traditional format for each Story Cover.
I began to define a book cover as something that delivers the essence of a narrative in a visual form – an object in and of itself. This definition frees the cover from the standard formats, unties its construction process from specific software programs, digital production and reproduction, opens it up to be more than ink on paper or pixels on a screen... it even releases the cover from being physically attached to a book. When I consider the book cover in this sense, it is a discrete object, a monument of a narrative, a monument to memory, a form of physical memory itself.
That definition marks a turning point in my work. I have started to make more experimental book covers that don’t really look like “book covers” at all. They exist as physical objects – non-digital, non-reproducible. The content and form are still very much tied to the individual stories, but the visual communication is executed in a much more flexible way. I consider these objects to be both covers and concrete poems.
