Seeds

Artist book for the annual Call & Response exhibition at George Mason University. Writers and artists are paired together, with one assigned to call, the other to respond. Seeds was my response to the call of poems by Evelyn Seay.

The poems Evelyn gave me all explored the parallels between the growth of plants and the growth of humans. Her words carried a sense of up and down movement, echoing the bidirectional growth of plants both down into the earth and up toward the sky. I wanted to capture that movement in the structure of the book — with each poem planted into the box as if a seed, the reader revealing Evelyn's words at their own pace.

Production Notes:
Printed in handset type on a Vandercook at Penland School of Crafts in Penland, NC
Lenox paper, bound with Kozo

This video captures what it feels like to interact with this book. Most of my materials tests (10+ prototypes) were aimed at making the “return” of the book back into the box as smooth and easy as possible.