Embedded Files
2026
Medium: collaborative mixed media sculpture: handmade book, paint, acetate, photographs, fabric, salt, frame, piano hammer
Dimensions: 24 x 19 x 15 cm
Cesi n'est pas un livre began as a small 11cm x 8cm x 2cm handmade book featuring five blank pages and five blank slide-out cards, one space for each of the five artists. The book was sent out wrapped in a tye-died cloth, and when the piece finished its journey the cloth had become a backing for a frame, to which the original book and a piano hammer had been attached.
Chrystene 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 created a wave on cloth with paint pens, then created five leaping salmon on acetate with acrylic and ink, mirrored on the back with five women to reflect the five artists in the collective.
3. Anne left the pages blank, and into the slot she inserted optometry photographs of her eyeball mounted on card stock.
4. Sheila took the tie dye wrapping the book was packaged in and turned it into a backing in a frame, as well as used it to cover the card. She added ink on her pages, and mounted the book on a frame, to which she also added a piano hammer.
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.
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