Evanesco - a selection of beleaguered frogs

Wire edge book features 17 images of frogs with varying status from the IUCN Red List of Endangered species.

This project began with a batch of biology notebooks from my great-aunt Ruth's archive that were created in 1920 as part of her undergraduate education. I inked over several of her pencil drawings detailing frog biology, treated the pages so they would be receptive to oil paint, then painted a variety of frogs, one to a page. Scanned at high-resolution, these images were printed on hand-dyed Mohawk Superfine Text paper with archival digital inks. The images were each mounted on a core of museum board wrapped with elephant hide paper with further details about the depicted frog hand-written in red ink. The pages are bound using a wire edge structure, onto copper rods. The book and box covers have been treated with shellac, then overpainted with gesso, oil and wax. The covers each have a hand-painted frog behind a laser etched mica labels. The diamond shaped book is housed in a custom box with text laser etched into the tray corner pieces. The base of the box has a print out of a circle graph with a hand-written legend under a layer of cast acrylic.