The Altered Book was my favorite assignment as an art student to date.  As I used to tell my kindergarten students, “books are precious.”  My love for books is somewhat in conflict with my aspirations to have an uncluttered life.  Books are bulky, and they approach the status of sacred relics for many people.  But they often sit like silent sentinels on dusty high shelves.  The idea of transforming a book to give it a new life, new audience, and hurtle it into a new realm of meaning, well, that is a fascinating challenge.  I also loved the open-endedness of this assignment:  construct, destruct — choose your adventure!  Visiting the library exhibit, The Art of The Book, was a perfect starting place.  It helped me consider what makes a book a book, and to begin thinking about how I would translate that to my project.  One piece particularly spoke to me, because of its form.  Its accordian style pages spilling out from the frame evoked the abundance that is usually packed inside the covers of a book.  

Right before I went to the exhibit, I had settled on a book, The Vegetable Bible, a beautifully illustrated compendium of vegetables from around the world, with notes on history, cultivation, and preparation.  I saw images of bitter melons, like my mother-in-law used to prepare in Nairobi, and blackeyed peas that Nanu always made dimes in the dish for New Year’s Day, and plenty of unfamiliar foods, too.  I went through the book, page by page, choosing images that resonated with me.  I began to play around with the idea of my life in terms of food.  Reflecting on this idea led me to envision all the kitchens of my homes over the years, back to my earliest memories in 70s suburbia.  My step-daughter had given me a set of vintage paper doll backdrops, and when I dug them up knew at once that I had to incorporate them somehow because they reminded me so much of my childhood.  I love dollhouses and creating little tableaus, so I began to make a tiny kitchen to fit in the book, inside the front cover.  

After painting and mounting the pieces on small boxes to form the kitchen cabinet, stove, and fridge, I used a utility knife to hollow out a space for the pieces to fit when the book was closed.  I liked the idea of retaining the original look of the book from the outside, with an inner world that is revealed when opened.  I began to build up a collage around the boxes to complete the impression of a kitchen, with some fantastical elements like giant pumpkins and a larger-than-life curry plant, two plants that hold outsized meaning for me.  I added a window with sparkly lights outside, photographed my own backsplash to create a tiled floor, painted floorboards, and finished the scene with a picture of myself in my first real apartment kitchen in Little Five Points. The skills I developed with adhesives and precise cutting from our first collage project came in handy with this work.

The next step was to consider the “pages.”  I knew I wanted to use the accordion idea, but to make it my own, I wanted to cover the paper pages with fabric that echoed 70s kitchen wallpaper.  I already had strips of yellow calico.  It was pretty exacting to measure and cut the fabric and glue it to the paper strips and ever harder to keep them from buckling.  I used weights and binder clips to press the fold together.  Then I started to consider what would go on the pages.  It didn’t seem meaningful to just reattach the photographs from the book without some other imagery to the story of My Life in Kitchens.  So I went into the attic and dug through a shoebox of old photos and journals, which included snippets of recipes and shopping lists from decades ago.  I found items that spoke to the story I wanted to tell, photocopied them, and added to my pile of images.  Next, I thought about how I’d like the story to literally unfold. I wanted it to come out from the kitchen chronologically, with the oldest items in the back, and newer images like that of my adult daughters cooking or enjoying food, and my husband Danny baking bread, in front.  Some images were too large for one strip, so I cut them in two and arranged them to appear side-by-side on separate strips.  All this took some time to lay out before finally gluing it all down.  The pictorial narrative that resulted inspired me to sit down and hand write a memoir.  I scanned them to preserve the content, then cut them up in order and glued this “backstory” on the reserve side of each picture.  I’ve always liked the idea of encoding private language into public art. 

I spent more hours on this project than I have on anything else.  My biggest take-away from this project, aside from thinking deeply about books, was just how much time goes into creating a piece of art — from conceptualization, planning, and assembly.  This experience deepened my appreciation for the work of artists of all kinds.