Artist Statement
As a still-life photographer with a degree in anthropology, I am intrigued by found materials and artifacts. I am especially drawn to handwritten notations and objects that have been transformed by hand.
As early as I can remember, I loved looking at the fragile volumes of Hebrew books relegated to our basement. One book in particular captured my attention and imagination: its pagers were a beautiful blue, its endpapers a jumble of scribbles. As a child, I recognized that some of the markings were Hebrew, but most were unidentifiable. The fragments of text were impossibly exotic and unselfconscious. I used to pore over these squiggles and graceful glyphs for hours, trying to decipher them.
Placing one’s stamp, both literally and figuratively, on the endpapers of a Hebrew book was not uncommon in the 18th and 19th centuries. People recorded the book’s purchase price, stamped their ownership marks, practiced spelling, unclogged their ink nibs, spilled their ink, and doodled in boredom. These books frequently passed from hand to hand, so the endpapers became a kind of palimpsest of languages and writing styles.
These orphaned tomes connected me to a time and place far beyond my Missouri upbringing. I imagined how they had traveled from hand to hand for centuries, like portable identities.
When placing the pages of these ancient books beneath the lens of my 4x5 studio camera, I feel that entire worlds are awakened. These lines and splotches – which inhabit the liminal space between the mundane and the sacred – continue to be transformed with the passage of time.
There are 18 pieces in this body of work. Reproducing the photographs large creates abstract compositions that transform the traces of text and scribbles, yet again. The photographs are all sepia and gold-tones gelatin silver prints.
