Manassas, Virginia, was our next stop. The landscape is forever changing from the desert of the West to unbearable humidity in the East. I am reminded of the effects of the weather back home as we get closer to my hometown of Ottawa, Ontario, and Gatineau, Québec.
© 2017 Louise Levergneux, Prince-William Campground, Manassas, VA
No time to visit studios, but my internet searches lead me to talented artists’ bookmakers. I was interested in books that reflected the way each of us sees our surrounding landscape. The book Landscape within a book published by Louisa Boyd left an impression.
© 2001 Louisa Boyd, Landscape within a book, handbound artists' book, formed by tearing; the imagery was added with watercolour paint and pencils
© 2001 Louisa Boyd, Landscape within a book, folded with a landscape image painted onto it in watercolour
These artists’ books were developed after a series of personal experiences and events that led me to feel at a distance from nature, periods of my life where I lived in cities and found it difficult to experience quiet, serenity, and events such as the foot and mouth epidemic (2001) in the UK that led to large areas of the countryside being temporarily inaccessible.
It was during these periods of time I started to recognise how important the natural environment was to me and longed to immerse myself in it and portray it through my work, consequently, the themes of restriction and freedom consistently reoccur in this series of works. In this, there is also a wider message of societal detachment from nature.
Working with books sculpturally allowed me to represent these concepts in this instance. Pages were used restrictively to only give glimpses of information contained within them due to cut work, how they are bound and exhibited. Images are broken by the pages and disjointed.
Many of my books are not meant to be opened with pages turned, they are meant to be viewed only as a three-dimensional form. This series of works use this format more so than any of my later pieces. The books are bound on tapes of paper with linen thread using a multiple signature binding. They have no covers.
How do you see your landscape?
How do you portray your surroundings?
How do you view where you live?
Let me know, I would love to hear.