Give Us This Day Our Daily Breath
My most recent project involves a collaboration with my dear friend Claudia Blanchard. Like me, she has also been coping with the Coronavirus Pandemic by making art, in her way through writing. She asked if I would be interested in creating a book of her work, and of course, I said yes. She added two friends from her local writing group, John Stickney and Suzy Tenenbaum. Claudia selected and edited their work. I chose imagery that fit the content of the writing and also sequenced the order of the work. Claudia, who lives in North Carolina, approved of each phase of the project as it developed. The last phase was to digitally print the book from an InDesign file. Give Us This Day Our Daily Breath is stab-bound with a book cloth wrap on the spine. There are thirty-eight pages on
8.5 x 11-inch horizontal HP brochure paper, 48 lb. The cover contains an image from my pandemic collages.
8.5 x 11-inch horizontal HP brochure paper, 48 lb. The cover contains an image from my pandemic collages.
Altars, An Ethnographic Study of Personal Spiritual Altars and Shrines Collaboration.
After my friend of many years, photographer Garin Horner, explained the ideas for his project about documenting personal altars, I wholeheartedly agreed to be one of the first subjects. [See my homepage image.] I immediately envisioned a book as an additional form of presentation beyond an exhibition of his photographs. Altars is a hardbound casebook digitally printed with tipped-in photographs by Garin. The covers are constructed from antique altar linens (burse and pall) with Catholic and Buddhist adornments. The idea for this project is based on the premise that there are as many unique representations of spiritual expression as there are people. The subjects Garin chose to collaborate with are a combination of artists, actors, and spiritual practitioners who want to give voice to and celebrate their own distinct views as part of a multitude of spiritual beliefs. As the images evolved and Garin shared them with me, I thought the book design needed some form of text that would expand the interpretation of the altar/shrine photographs. I selected the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca, although the use of poetry breaks with the standard explanatory text that often accompanies ethno-photographic studies. His poetry with its soulful meditations on the natural world and the creative spirit, as well as his use of place and object, added the right dimension needed for our book collaboration. |