Ceci n'est pas un livre

1. Chrystene: I started with a sketch of two hands pulling apart the slot, and a card with a watercolour painting of a hand on each side, one cradling a beetle, the other crushing a flower.

2. Loretta: After beginning my own piece (Create), this was the first time in the process that I received a piece directly from its originator. When I received Chrystene’s book, I considered her imagery, its possible meanings, and wondered about the best way to respond. I decided not to attempt to continue her story, but to contribute my own. I wanted to play with the book form by using fabric to create a flowing rather than rigid surface on the opening pages. I used fabric pens and paint pens to depict waves, with splashes around the opening slot that held the removable “card.” Turning to my typical use of transparency, I replaced the paper card with a piece of clear acetate and drew with black pen. I reflected on our collective, this collaboration, and the land I live on near the Cowichan River, and chose to draw 5 Chinook salmon, the traditional food source of the Quw’utsun people,”jumping” out of the water as you open the page. On the reverse side, I filled the outline of the salmon with a white paint pen and drew 5 nude female figures inside the outlines, similarly jumping out of the water.

3. Anne left the pages blank, and into the slot she inserted optometry photographs of her eyeball mounted on card stock.

4. Sheila: The final piece was a challenge. I received a beautiful small book and an empty frame. The book was wrapped in this cosmic-looking fabric; it told me it had to be more than a protective wrapping. I took the fabric and wrapped some around a piece of cardboard to insert in the book, then started to draw some of the lines into the book. I then took the rest of the fabric and created an abstract image for the frame, I also added some sea salt to this and adhered the book to the frame.  I anchored the piece by adding a hammer from a piano signifying vibration to move forward.

5. Laura: When is a book no longer a book?  The clues that I gathered from this work all pointed to a celestial topic. The image on the cover of the small book seemed lunar, the pink stones adhered to the dyed cloth glinted like stars, the dye pattern in the cloth reminded me of a solar system. The piano hammer was shaped like The Big Dipper. Some of the images inside the book could be seen as cycles of life perhaps. I researched online about a coral whose reproductive cycle is connected to lunar cycles and did drawings of coral in kelp on the back page. I sent it back to Chrystene.