Nails One

From an ongoing series of artists’ books, each featuring ‘a collection of things’. The series explores using invented or adapted book structures that lend themselves to holding physical objects in addition to or instead of images and words.

This book, an obvious play on the multiple meanings of the word 'nails' is made from antique nails gifted to me by an acquaintance who wished the nails, pulled from a historic structure she used for many years before being forced to demolish it, to be put to another use - as inspiration for an art work. The pages are bits of rosewood left over from my father's harpsichord making shop - he used them to hand craft the key arcades on his instruments. The finger and toe nails, cast in epoxy resin, exhibit a quirky obsession to save and put to use many things I run across in my day-to-day.