Candidacy Presentation
On April 29, I shared my progress from the first year of grad school and ideas about what I will spend the second year working on. This was presented to VCU faculty and guests, followed by discussion. I have recreated the presentation here, with my spoken words below each slide.
My proposal is called Memory, Materiality, and the Book Cover. I will employ the book cover as a portal to explore themes of memory and materiality.
I am interested and confused by memory. It’s such an essential part of being human, yet so mysterious and difficult to pin down. It controls me and what I do, often driving me crazy.
I’m interested in the way memory accumulates over the course of one’s life and across culture as a whole, creating a foundation and potential for new understanding... and the way we are each an expression of past events that have happened to us.
We interpret and experience the world in the context of our memory. We use memory to construct our sense of self, our cultural identity... our reality. Visual communication is rooted in memory.
I see memory as a dance between presence and absence, always moving toward or away from one extreme, existing at the border of nothingness. It is impermanent even if it tries desperately to hold on to a physical reminder – our photographs fade alongside our minds. This is an installation called Fading Memory. Photographs were submerged in a solution of bleach and water.
Over a five-hour period the images slowly changed tone, representing the influence of time on human memory. The dried, bleached photographs are physical traces of the memories contained in the images and of the installation itself. This piece physically embodies the abstract experience of fading memory – the process is the message, the materials realize the concept.
As an artist and designer, I am interested in what memory looks like. I believe visual form is a vessel that contains, transports, and records memory – traces of physical and metaphysical experiences and perceptions.
Materials preserve evidence of form-making processes and tools, becoming objects that hold the memory of their construction and manufacture. These wheel-thrown stoneware vessels are a permanent memory of my body’s movements – the pressure of my fingertips, the position of my feet, the rhythm of my breathing. The forms are also a record of forces of temperature, the kiln’s atmosphere of oxidation or reduction –
a series of chemical reactions that make themselves visible in the final piece.
A ceramic bowl is a vessel in its essential form as an empty concave object, but also in the sense that its visual form undergoes subtle changes over time, recording a memory of what the object has held or how it has been used or misused.
Other things such as thoughts and culture are less concrete – yet their memory can still be communicated in visual form. I believe letterforms are visual expressions of the natural, man-made, cultural, and social environments in which they were created. For example, the stark Runic script of ancient Iceland bears an unmistakable resemblance to volcanic stones standing bleakly against the landscape.
The eighteenth-century French typeface Didot has a remarkably similar silhouette to the furniture and architecture that was popular at its time. Didot is the memory of eighteenth-century France in visual form.
During the Industrial Revolution, sans-serif typefaces such as Akzidenz Grotesk mimicked the mechanical forms of the new, technology-driven civilization.
And more recently, Zuzana Licko’s Lo-Res bitmap fonts designed for use on 72dpi computer screens visually reveal their connection to the digital world. It is these kinds of relationships that make a typeface unique to a time and place. Type is more than just ink on a page or pixels on a screen – it is alive and expressive, a vessel carrying memory in its form.
These letterforms come together to form words and sentences, mementos of experiences that are constructed in the form of books. Books are our means of preserving the secrets of the past and contemplating the future, the cumulative memory and imagination of mankind.
Books are a link between physical and metaphysical memory – a vessel on multiple levels, they communicate through both their concrete visual form and the abstract language they contain. Type is a vessel for sound, sound is a vessel for language, and language is a vessel for memory and imagination. Books and reading provide us with a gateway to enter this memory and imagination freely.
I am interested in the connection between books, reading, and the body. I think of writing as the embodiment of voice... books as reflections and extensions of our bodies and selves. We are even built of the same parts. These are a couple of experiments in physically layering, echoing, and reflecting the names of body parts common to humans and books.
I think about humans as being the storytellers of the world, the keepers of memory. In this way humans and books are the same. This object is a meditation on that idea. It begins a flat triangle,
then unfolds through layers of concentric images symbolizing letters, books, and the human body. Humans are vessels for receiving and creating the universe while also being contained within it. Letters, books, and humans exist in a recursive cycle – creating, recreating, and depending on each other.
Similar to memories that accumulate and change over time, and human bodies that grow and age, books and the experience of reading are not static. "Reading changes our lives and our lives change our reading." This constant interplay between past, present, and future is parallel to and impossible to separate from our individual experience of memory. Books embody a continuous cycle of recording, reinterpreting, and recreating memory through words and visual form. (quote: Proust and the Squid)
Book covers are very important: they are the gateway to all these amazing qualities of books and reading.
They are portals to the other worlds and times that exist in literature. They are the entry point to the vehicle of reading, the front doors to the library of memory that lives immortally in books. (image: www.loveagency.lt)
Book covers protect and preserve these traces while welcoming us into them, acting as a bridge between our self’s consciousness and others’ and between past, present, and future. (image: www.loveagency.lt)
I consider book cover design to be an important responsibility, one that extends beyond individual books or marketing goals and contributes to shaping our culture. The cover is a key part of our decision-making process about which books we read, translating into which ideas we allow to soak into our individual and collective identities.
In this way, book covers play a significant role in adding new layers to the foundation of memory. Looking at book covers, we can learn about ourselves... the good, and the bad.
In their book called By Its Cover, Ned Drew and Paul Sternberger use the various covers of James Joyce’s Ulysses to demonstrate that book covers are a mirror in which we can see ourselves. Beginning with Ernst Reichl’s original modernist design from 1934,
pushed to an even purer level by E. McKnight Kauffer,
to the “suburban blandness” of the uncredited 1940 edition,
followed by Carin Goldberg’s use of modernism as an act of “historical quotation” in 1986,
and finally the 2002 edition, a revival of Reichl’s original design – these covers are documents of “historical moments, articulations of our cultural identity.” As Drew and Sternberger put it, “The designs conjure up associations of our personal and collective encounters with the groundbreaking intellectual expressions of our times. They define what we were, what we hoped to be, and sometimes, what we have become.” Book covers are not simply pretty packaging. They are important artifacts. (quotes and Ulysses images: By Its Cover)
I began designing book covers during college at RISD. For my senior degree project, I designed series of 25 covers for Borge's collection of short stories Labyrinths. After graduating, I continued designing book covers for short stories as a contrast to our client work. It was a natural progression to continue doing this at VCU.
Story Covers is my ongoing series of book covers designed for short stories and essays. Through a process of reading, writing, and sketching I distill each text down to its key points and construct an image that communicates the essence of the narrative, the title, and the author’s name. I would like to share a few examples with you.
Susan Sontag argues that "through photographs, the world becomes a series of unrelated, freestanding particles; and history, past and present, a set of anecdotes." Photographs and memories are intertwined with each other. All of these different pieces of our lives and thoughts and relationships shattered into particles. I responded to this visually by slicing paper strips representing frames into many pieces, folding them, piling them up and scanning them. (quote: On Photography)
In the Rotifer, a woman pieces together experiences that take place over many years, amounting to a greater story about how we all exist in different realities, separated by our size, time, or complexities of what we do not know or cannot do. When these different realities whirl together, we experience moments of intersection that make the separateness of our individual dimensions evident. A typographic illustration cut out of paper embodies these ideas.
Parade is a story about a Maori woman’s struggle to make sense of her race and identity, attempting to rearrange her own reality and memory. I used strands of hair as a symbol of identity, ethnicity, and a marker of time.
In all of my covers, my visual decisions are driven by specific moments in the text. This richness means the book cover gives back to the reader as he or she reads the story. There are connections to discover.
When I step back and look at my book covers, I can see that they are partly driven by my reaction to this common phrase. Don’t judge a book by its cover, or you can’t judge a book by its cover. I disagree. You can judge a book based on my covers. The fact that outward appearance, form, and material communicates is inescapable. The phrase discredits the power of design. My opposing viewpoint elevates design rather than reducing it. In fact, you can judge more than just the book from the cover. Remember the Ulysses examples, and the memory and information that they carried?
We tend to look at book covers from a default perspective – in terms of their influence on sales, their standardized visual form, pretty layouts of type and image. I am interested, however, in looking at book covers from a phenomenological attitude – looking through book covers rather than at them.
I want to examine more than simply the appearance of a book cover or the process of making one, and see what I can learn by exploring the themes of memory and materiality through the concept of the book cover. I will attempt to unpack the idea of the book cover that we normally encounter and reduce it down to its elemental categories... try to peel back the layers surrounding the concept of the book cover, unbuild it, then reconstruct it in a new way. (image: www.bookdust.com)
I 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. The next few slides are covers for a story called Roses, Rhododendron by Alice Adams The story is about the relationship between two women. The essence is about seeing one’s self from multiple perspectives – from the past and the present, through yourself and through someone else. I created a series of typographic objects that must be viewed from multiple perspectives to read the title. In this example, pigment was applied to glass on both sides of the surface.
Mirrors were manipulated with a combination of etching and transferred type, causing the individual words to appear and disappear depending on how the piece is moved in the light.
In a third study, individual paper letters intertwine to form a surface. The word roses appears on one side...
and rhododendron becomes visible on the reverse. These objects embody the relationship between the characters – separate, yet dependent on each other.
I've also been thinking about structuralism recently – the idea that there are underlying systems and patterns to everything our world, beginning with language and extending out into all aspects of our experience as humans. This explains how poetry works.
Poets use words in ways that are different from our everyday understanding of language’s structure. When the poet makes the reader see the structure of his language in a new way, he in turn sees the structure of his world in a new way. I view poetry as a process, a method as opposed to a thing or a result. Poetry is the process of words overcoming the default structure of language, it’s a process of defamiliarization. (image: Concrete Poetry: A World View)
While written poetry uses language to defamiliarize the ordinary, artists and designers can use the languages of color, form, typography, scale, and materials to create visual poetry. I wonder, by defamiliarizing the book cover through changing scale and materials, releasing it from its traditional format, can I access the phenomenological qualities of the book cover? Can I make book covers that are also visual, concrete poetry? (image: Concrete Poetry: A World View)
This is a cover for a story called Little Selves by Mary Lerner As she prepares to die, an elderly woman resurrects memories of her previous selves over the course of her life, seeing them as little girls in her mind. She worries that these little selves will die along with her. In order to preserve them, she recounts her memories aloud to her niece. I created twelve collages – one for each of the letterforms in the title, combined with a silhouette of a woman’s head. I transferred these collages into concrete as an act of preserving the memory in a permanent material.
The leftover paper collages were folded into envelopes to contain each corresponding tile and held in a concrete box reminiscent of a tomb and a card catalog. The object embodies the essence of the narrative – ideas of multiple selves, reflection, and preservation – as well as the memory of my construction process. This piece, and Roses, Rhododendron, are examples of me attempting to unpack the idea of the book cover that we normally encounter and reduce it down to its elemental purpose of delivering the essence of a narrative in a visual form... using scale and materials to create visual poetry... using the book cover as a portal to think about memory and materials.
I would like to talk a little more specifically about materials. I believe changing the material form of an object can change its meaning and the way memory is affected when encountering the form. Materials affect our relationships with objects.
We are conditioned to experiencing book covers in printed, paper form.
And now, more and more we are becoming used to experiencing book covers on screen. What happens if book covers are made of clay, fabric, glass, or jelly? How does a shift in material change how we perceive the book cover as object, how we enter the stories inside, and how the visual form touches and manipulates our memory?
I am especially drawn to the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi and its approach to materials. The characteristics of memory – such as imperfect, irregular, impermanent, and incomplete – are parallel to those of wabi-sabi.
Materials that exhibit the qualities of wabi-sabi are visual manifestations of memory. Some materials that I would like to investigate are things like clay, skin, wood and glass. In general, materials that are organic, natural, or recycled.
With that in mind, this spring I carried out a number of material experiments. One was an investigation into shibori, the japanese technique of resist dyeing. Cloth is manipulated by clamping, folding, sewing, and wrapping before it is dyed. The cloth records the shape and pressure of the three-dimensional form that was applied to it when it is returned to two-dimensional form. The resulting pieces are visible memories of temperature, friction, dye, and other processes that the cloth experienced.
This piece is an index of washers embedded in cashmere, submerged in a boiling dye bath for thirty minutes, and then set free. The form of the washers remains in the felted cashmere as a ghost or shell – a trace of a force that is no longer there. It is a memory made visible.
I’ve applied some of my material experiments to the book cover. This cover for a story called Seven Floors. A man is admitted to a hospital where the patients are housed on each floor of the seven-story building according to the gravity of their state. The top floor is for mild cases like him, going all the way down to the hopeless cases on the first floor. The man is is moved down the floors as he becomes more and more ill, eventually passing away.
To represent his fading health and life, I burned typography through a stack of paper seven layers high. The type on the top few layers is dark and legible,
but it slowly disintegrates layer by layer...
...
...
...
... until the last sheet where hardly any trace of the burn is visible. The process, material, and typography embody the character’s health and energy – the visual form is a manifestation of the essence of the story.
Part of this first year at VCU has been self-reflection about my process. I view design as a process of construction, and the resulting objects as memories of that process. The objects I make exhibit traces of the making, of what just happened to them.
I owe much of my process to my teachers, Skolos + Wedell. They taught me to use processes that involve my hands, relying on the computer as a supplementary tool. I am usually switching back and forth from analog to digital, attempting to fuse the two together. Integrating type and image in new ways is my ultimate goal. (image: www.skolos-wedell.com)
Anything can become and image. I construct things and then converting them into images. This is a cover that Meaghan Dee and I created together. A child has burned to death in a pile of dried plants in the backyard, and the family goes to her funeral. The leaf embodies the themes of the story – life and death, the changing of seasons, and the precious nature of human existence. We lasercut typography into actual leaves, using the element of fire itself to form the title so the words emerge organically.
Tools are a way to discover things. Tools and habits go together – every tool has a memory in the way it is used. Changing my tools means changing my habits, allowing me to work in a visual language that is new to me. This cover is for a story about war, in the form of a list of all of the mundane items that soldiers carry on their bodies. Things such as weapons and photographs are manifestations of the soldiers’ heavy feelings such as fear and memory. I borrowed a tool from painting and printmaking – japanese stencil paper – but used it as if it was a film negative. Light shines through the stencil paper in an irregular way, creating an image that is reminiscent of camouflage and the Vietman jungle.
Materials have the same effect as tools, so I try to explore many. I am interested in taking materials outside of their normal mode of use remixing materials, design elements, and forms – putting things together that are not usually related. For example, I was curious if concrete would absorb an image, so I set up a test with many different types of prints and pigments.
The results were positive.
I found that marrying concrete with prints and pigments takes the materials out of their normal utilitarian functions and into the realm of the poetic. This is magic to me.
Those are some things I’ve been thinking about and making. I have some ideas about what comes next, this summer and fall.
I will be asking questions regarding book covers, memory and materials such as: How can I infuse the unexpected into the expected form of the book cover? How can memory be constructed and reconstructed through visual form? What does forgetting look like?
I will investigate relevant topics including: history of the book and its cover, history of human thought about memory and the mind language, metaphors and clichés surrounding the book cover, other types of covers such as clothing or skin, related phrases in our language such as skin deep, and the equilibrium and inherent properties of materials.
I’ll be taking a glass kilnworking class, and a metalsmithing class, where I will continue my exploration of three dimensional, non-traditional book covers. I’ll be using stories as inspiration and content to continue extracting the nature of the book cover, morphing it into other objects and materials.
I will also be experimenting with textiles. I am specifically interested in the form of the cape and the quilt. They are both covers. I see a relationship between the book cover, the body cover, and the bed cover... and a relationship between the line of thoughts, the line of words, and the line of threads. (quilt: www.carriestrine.com)
So that is where I am today. Thank you very much for your attention.