Ice Storm - Book a Week Project

Part of a 2009 Book a Week project, Ice Storm was ideated while I was waiting for an arborist to come cut down some trees. Necessary though it is, my heart grows heavy at the thought of cutting down these trees. So I decided to make a book with elements of both trees and heart. Always fond of trees, both in urban settings and in forests, I have a nice collection of color slides from which I selected 10 to use in this book. I created a found poem from a blog post called 'Thinking Like a Tree'. Continuing with the theme of wood, I relief printed the pages from planks of wood and mounted color slide transparencies in window cut outs. The text is laser transferred onto each page. As is often true in my book works, reading the text is straightforward but 'reading' beyond the text is a more complex and time consuming process. Both their small scale and absence of lighting from behind requires a viewer to actively engage with the object to experience the content. An experience that parallels both the reading of poetry and walking through a forest.