This past Saturday, despite the snow/mix that came to the DC
area, I went to the book arts symposium put on by Corcoran School of The Arts
and Design/ The George Washington University.
I was joined by some other intrepid folks and enjoyed an afternoon of talks
on artist books and type.
The keynote speaker was Daniel Kelm. For those of you who don’t know Daniel, he is
a vastly fascinating man. He was formally trained in chemistry and taught for
many years. His interest in books began
in the late 1970’s and has continued since that time.
He talked about his formative years and interests in
chemistry, even setting up a lab outside his father’s dark room, where he
almost killed himself making chlorine gas. As book artist, his interested has
evolved around the integration of art and science and the connection between
book and the reader. Some of his works are these amazing articulated sculptures
without words. People are invariably
awed and connected to the work after playing with them. It was a great talk.
The next three presenters were equally interesting. Lilla Vererdy, the head of Special
Collections at the Dibner Library gave a talk entitled, The Anatomy of an Anatomy Book: Johnannes Ketham’s 1495 Work in Joyce
Cutler-Shaw’s Hands (2004).
This was especially interesting, as this book artist has
used the original 1495 book as a launching pad. While given this project in 1995, she took almost 10 years to
finish. She travel extensively to Italy
to see medical models, and books. Spent time in dissection labs and drew
pictures, wrote both prose and poems as a reflection of the original text. The
end result is a beautifully done book that I will post about in detail in a
later post.
Stan Nelsons talk on Hand
Made Type: Art or Anachronism, was also interesting. He talked about the process of making type by
hand. He is probably one of the last people working on this time consuming process. He brought samples of some of his letterpress
work that used type he’d made and also the punches and process pieces he’s
working on currently.
The last speaker was Ward Tietz. His talk, “The Tension Between Word and Image”, was
scholarly and perhaps because it was later in the afternoon, I had a bit of a
hard time following. His premise was our
brains are changing, the way we interact with text and image is changing and
will continue to change.
After the three spoke individually, there was a panel
discussion. By this time, I’ll admit, I was
a little concerned about the road conditions.
I stayed a while at the closing reception, had a change to speak to both
Lilla and Ward about their talks and then got back on the train to Virginia.
If course, I made it home, but it was not a fun 5 miles….
