Colleen Weiman

I have always been curious about the relationship between art and the viewer. I am drawn to works you can touch. As a painter, I am very aware of the limitations of my medium of choice, especially in regard to the separation that exists between a painting and the viewer. To overcome this, my practice is focused on making works that can be interacted with more directly, typically turning to art forms that are considered to be ‘craft’ more than ‘fine art’.

The book offers an intimacy and invites the interaction that is vital in my work, and which is, more often than not, absent in the fine art world. Books are meant to be touched, to be held and leafed through. Due to the intimate nature of books, they are the perfect format for sharing memories. For my thesis I have created a series of hand stitched books depicting the plant life I have strong memories of from the time I spent as a child at the flower shop my family owned.