Eclipse

I make books because they allow me to put my feelings and impressions about an experience into a visual and tactile context. I can hold the book in my hands and revisit an experience that was meaningful. For ECLIPSE I wanted to make a book that could speak to the experience of seeing cave paintings that are beautiful, mysterious, and tragic. ECLIPSE refers to the destruction of the early Chumash Indian culture but also to one of the central images in the cave that experts judge is a representation of the solar eclipse of November 24, 1677. 

This has been a wonderfully interesting book to make. How to make a book that allows the reader to feel that they are inside the cave with the Chumash paintings? Formatting each page to be progressively longer allows you to see all of the images at once and as you lift each page, more of the cave is revealed. I used Photoshop to rotate, crop and adjust colors—the photos came from two cameras. This book has been an exercise in improvisation. Lesson: Don't drill the holes into the boards and papers until you have figured out the stitching pattern. I used a simple Japanese stab binding to hold the book together but couldn't work out a way to hold the top cover to the binding of the structure. So, I used leather leftover from the upholstery of my husband's hand-crafted Morris chair. It was easier to cut and glue that I thought it would be. But, it still left the matter of three holes drilled into the top board, so I used linen thread to sew on beads and I rather like the results. Materials used: Moab Entrada papers, Epson CX6000 printer, linen thread, redwood "lumber", leather, beads.