2013
Altered copy of War and Peace, butterflies, pins, balsa wood, foam core, sheet plastic
The altering of this book involved hollowing out a lovely, preexisting copy of War and Peace, gutting its insides chunk by chunk and dulling about five Xacto knife blades in the process. In the spirit of “an artist should acquire as many skills as possible in order to be independent and therefore do all their own work” I decided to spread and pin my own butterflies, buying them from a collection website that resembled the fever dreams of a tweenage girl’s gel pen-ridden diary (in reality managed by a charmingly chatty couple with matching mullets). The butterflies arrived folded in half, individually wrapped in paper triangles and bone-dry brittle. After exactly 28 hours of rehydration between layers of wet paper towels in a Tupperware container usually used for muffin storage, the butterflies were ready to be pinned. Apologizing fervently to their little butterfly souls in butterfly heaven, I pierced their thoraxes right down the middle and pinned them to an improvised spreading board made from balsa wood and foam core. Having pinned them flat and despite positively ruining the wings of my first two attempted butterflies (not featured in this book), I had achieved the task of spreading my own butterflies. Needless to say, skewered butterflies haunted my dreams for several nights after finishing this book and occasionally continue to do so.
Cover view of War and Peace
War and Peace in process
2014
Hardcover binding; digital photographic prints mounted on Rives BFK
This small book turns something as vast and impenetrable as the sky into a pocket-sized color study. Each bright square is sampled from photos I took while studying abroad in Madagascar. At the time, I had no intention of taking exclusively sky photography—rather, these samples were plucked from photos in which the sky was not the main focus. Taken out of context, they become abstract color swatches, entirely alien from the memories they accompany (this one was perhaps from an excellent sunset over a canyon, this one was the bright sunny sky above a posing lemur). Every color of the spectrum is expressed here: pale green at dusk, fiery red of a dusty sunset, lavender at dawn, unbelievable cyan, infinite variations of grey.
2013
Accordion book; wintergreen oil transfer images on monotype-printed Rives BFK
This accordion book combines two artistic renderings of slavery: the first, textually presented by Guy Tirolien in his anticolonialist poem Prière d’un petit enfant nègre, the second as image transfers of Michelangelo’s slave sculptures. The yellow text that repeats along the bottom of the book comes from the first two lines of the poem, translating to “[Lord,] I am very tired. I was born tired.”
Detail of Prière
Detail
2014
Digitally printed book
The Book Forest is a collection of thoughts, containing a short story of the same title, sample pages from my sketchbook, and some of my favorite poems on distressed backgrounds. It is, perhaps, a brief glimpse into my artist’s mind. In the universe of the short story, people are composed of three elements; the Body, the Voice, and the Self. The main character, the Shaker, has inexplicably lost her Voice and must therefore go on a wordplay sort of journey (reminiscent of The Phantom Tollbooth) roughly resembling the five stages of grief in order to recover it.
First spread of The Book Forest
Detail of The Book Forest
Detail
2014
Accordion book; ink, collage, and wintergreen oil transfers on monotype-printed Rives BFK, ribbon
This is a book of my family history in which I have blended a hierarchy of truth: it interweaves true, personally lived experience, stories that have been passed down for years, stories whose clarity has faded into myth, and pure mythology which I have invented. However, the mythology I have added to my family’s history is no more or less legitimate than any actual occurrence. Tim O’Brien puts it perfectly in his chapter of The Things They Carried, titled “How to Tell a True War Story:” “A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth…. story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.”
Cover of Family Taxonomy
Spread about Carib Nelson, the artist's father
Spread about the artist's mother and sister
Spread about the artist and her sister
2013
Screw post album; paint, ink, collage, and wintergreen oil transfers on monotype-printed Rives BFK
Inspired by David Levithan’s The Lover’s Dictionary, I have taken words and phrases and defined them as they are meaningful to me with stories, memories, and abstract thoughts. If ever you should have a question about me, the answer is probably in this book.
A few things this book contains:
Prayers for my father
Prayers for the Artist
A cantankerous physicist
A flying girl
Not one, but two dances
A half-hearted revenge plot
The Most Beautiful
2014
Screw post album inspired by The Lover's Dictionary by David Levithan. 26 pages including words and phrases as defined by the artist.
Heartrich, adj. (Or, Heartsick)
Parallax, n.
Digging, vb.
Flight, n.
2013
Japanese stab-bound book, watercolor and collage on Rives BFK
This is a collaborative art project created by me and seventeen members of my freshman dorm, Alondra. Inspired by Frank Warren’s large-scale community art project, Postsecret, I invited my dormmates to take a blank piece of paper and write a fear, anxiety, or personal demon on it, adding any illustrations or artistic elements they saw fit. If a student was uncomfortable creating art for their page, they could write their fear in pencil on the back and I would illustrate the page for them. These pages were returned to me anonymously, and I bound them together as the collective personal demons of eighteen 18-21 year olds. Despite their anonymity, many of the fears turned out to be shockingly similar: “I am afraid of failure,” “I am afraid I’m not good enough,” “I am so lonely I could die,” “I am waiting for a letter that will never come.”
2014
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Detail
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Detail
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Detail
2016
Altered copy of The Hobbit, book cloth
In addition to bookbinding and book altering, I occasionally rebind books. This involves taking sad beaten-up paperbacks and giving them glorious new hardcovers. This particular copy has received a new cover that involved the following process:
1) Make an etching (roughly 50 steps), convert etching into vinyl stencil (roughly 70 steps), make 3 variations of stencil
2) Prep book cloth for dye sublimation
3) Dye-sublimate etching onto book cloth
4) Screen-print stencil 1 (purple) onto book cloth
5) Screen-print stencil 2 (yellow) onto book cloth
6) Screen-print stencil 3 (orange) onto book cloth
7) At this point it is 4am. Make stencil for book title, misspell “Tolkien”
8) Screen-print stencil 4 onto book cloth. Misspelling is now permanent and irrevocable.
9) Attach book board onto book cloth, form cover
10) Bind softcover book into hardcover
11) Bring book to critique
12) Someone points out “Tolkien” is misspelled
13) Cry