WPLN News Archive; Home Bound (Susan Knowles) 3 15 05; News Archive 2/14/05-4/1/05

contrary to popular expectation computers have hardly spelled the end of reading even with magazines available online and books that can be printed out on demand bookstores are still doing a booming business librarian ms coleman believes that same urge for possession helps explain why some artists and began to make their own books people like to hold them they wanted into the bathtub with them were carried my ride the bus or they're so portable such thing so tactile about the incident did lend themselves well to a handmade art form the term artist book gaining anything from adding original illustrations to a well known tale to creating a new story told visually to binding a volume by hand in homebound now on view at the downtown library the offerings range from julie solos accordion for pop up about possums to a tiny book made out of an aspirin can by lesley paterson marks curator of the show as i was thinking more more about the show i've found more and more people that i discovered were making books that i now for

instance at harding i first knew him as a sculptor and then found out that he made books in italy called and she out used to think if or primarily as a painter but now these days she's making more books than any the mouse patterson marks points with lead in lead holds childishly grim books and andy harding's leather bound volumes holtz bug cemetery opens up to reveal a cross section burial ground with in six interred in wax coffins harding has created a series called atlas one two and three it looks like a set of leather bound reference books the covers are the most important part since most of the pages of blank with only fragments of maps or tiny bits of text here and there insect under the covers are copper plates cut into random shapes and then inside the mole their windows cut out with some imagery the map injury underneath

that window and in between there's a basically a clouded acrylic sheet so that the map is somewhat obscure and you can make it out and see it as a map but the idea of this sort of limitation and the book think i'm a symbol of a limited view or window into another world for librarian liz coleman the most fascinating piece is lesley paterson marks his latest a book that opens up to become a box with many compartments i love the boxes about her new old son and all kinds of amazing things in it it's got her husbands cheat has some of her hair has the sonograms it has a positive pregnancy test has his umbilical cord it's just this amazing object with beautiful photographs from the family and a little music box says biggie opened up and say this whole remarkable world comes out of it according to patterson marks book artist thriving in university art departments and beginning to be taught on the high school level and she believes that even young children should be

introduced to its possibilities well the first books ever made by hand were when i was about five or six years old and i would take the funny papers and then cut up the cartoons and then fold them up and stapled them and i'm given to my mom whose presence in and the sequence of the cartoons would be out of order and i thought that was even funnier that that they didn't make sense anymore she didn't make another book until graduate school when she began to incorporate found objects into her art there it just a lot of things that i had collected that suggested that they wanted to be books like an aspirin tan has little way it opens on the hinge or an evil book with that the soft clark pages and so that's really when when i started making books the thing that i'm working on now is from the book as a container you know making smaller books within

a larger book i think of that as like the mother book in the true that children deserve nested in that all of which goes to show just how potent a symbol is the book to see books by all of the artists visit the main library downtown reporter for national public radio i'm susan knowles again