I am a book artist whose work investigates the narrative possibilities of book design. In much the same way that a theater director might set ‘Romeo and Juliet’ in the present day Bronx to better explore themes in Shakespeare’s masterpiece, I design books that interact with the text to enhance the understanding or develop themes in the story. This work draws on the histories of art, design, and communications and is attempting to develop new ways of telling stories and explore the relevance of the book in today’s society.
Examples of my past projects include my design of Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Happy Prince’. My setting of this story, about love and understanding coming via a process of destruction, required the reader to rip open the book’s pages to be able to read the text. The resulting book was like a battlefield and echoed the story’s central theme. In my setting of Julio Cortazar’s ‘Continuity of Parks’, a cyclical, dramatic murder mystery the story was set in a lady’s day book to enhance the quality of time in the story and also so that you, the reader, were holding one of the central elements of the story — a leather bound book, so placing yourself in the narrative.
