System Theory

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". Limited edition of 10. Two volumes in clamshell box. Ships 7/15/2022.

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, and how it forms a third, completely different organism than would be possible without this combination, and how science is still rather flummoxed by many of the characteristics of it: is it an organism? Is it mostly a fungus? Is it a parasite? Is it mutually beneficial? Different scientists have different interpretations, and it was only at the invention of more powerful microscopes in the late 18th century that Erik Acharius teased out the component parts. I was also interested in their functionality: the time scale they operate in, by the climates they grow in, how they display interdependence into a new whole.

One of the books about lichen that I most enjoyed was Kem Luther’s book “Boundary Layer,” which including a reference to the work of a Canadian scientist, Trevor Goward, who wrote 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 come to the conclusion 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 in the desire to tell the story that interested me: the story of a system formed of interdependent parts.

This led me to start searching for other metaphor 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 using unexpected materials; and then, while using google books and the internet archive and searching using the term “system theory,” I came across John Stuart Mill’s book which established social science, A System of Logic.

This is, honestly, a very long book that spends a very long time talking about the nature of logic and the establishment of scientific norms, but, once you are through all the introductory matter, there is a compelling section that applies the nature of 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.

The rest of the process became a study in how to combine these elements in a form which respected both the biology of lichens and the science of society, telling both narratives concurrently without causing information overload or blurring the essential nature of what I found compelling. 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 same way that volume 1 has three disparate elements [algae, fungus, cyanobacteria; Goward, Stuart Mills, historic botanical plates], so does volume two: embroidered text, woodblock prints, and digital collages.

Volume two of the book uses a more poetic exploration of the visual nature of lichen, combined with the most laborious and slow-growing method of creating text on the page that is possible — hand embroidery.

Combining materials, paper, wood, fabric mirrors the way that lichen is a plant-like growth on rocks and trees — and inspired by the fabric books of Louise Bourgeois for inspiration in how cloth could work as  a book structure. [New York Times | MoMA [original] | [edition] ]

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. The first step was to explore how to create a print from a piece of wood. There was a great online forum of Canadian woodworkers who had a conversation where sanding the wood smooth and then using a wire brush drill attachment to pull out the soft 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 then digitally printed onto organic cotton, which was then dyed in the studio in a bath of acorn dye [acorns collected by my nephews over Thanksgiving], then cut down into panels for the books.

Embroidery was always a foundational part of the conception of this project: it is text literally growing on the substrate, the way that lichen grows on trees and rocks, and it is slow, remarkably slower, slower even than calligraphy or using handset type; it operates at the scale that lichen grows. It took me some time to develop how I wanted the embroidery to work with the woodcut collages: I wasn’t certain what text or imagery was most appropriate, but remembered that I had a copy of the famous Encyclopaedia Britannica 11th Edition, and the article on Sociology fit in cleanly with the message that I sought through 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 narratively illustrate this concept of the sum being greater than the parts. After each pane was embroidered, it was trimmed with a rough edge, formed into signatures with a second embroidered panel and two collages, and the outer edges were stitched, in pursuit of the softer edge finish this provides.

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.

Field Guide

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

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 | Codex 2022, booth 50

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.