Manuscript Inspirations in Course 322

Typography with Julie Baugnet   Fall 2012

After a trip to view the illuminated manuscripts at the Hill Museum & Manuscript Libray students worked on their typography skills and created hand-bound books. They viewed the original pages of the St. John's Bible created by the renowned Wales calligrapher Donald Jackson. As inspiration and to understand the process of creating this new work of 7 volumes, students watched the BBC Video entitled The Illuminator. Below are the student books by Marshall Brewer, Jeanie Dinsmore, Kolina Stepanenkova, Joanna Green, and Ali Feneis.

For this class I wasn't sure what I would do. Yet some how in the end I accumulated quite a few books. A few for sketching, two were concept books & one last book with mostly blank pages.

Japanese Stabbinding

Birdseye Maple

Coptic binding with sewn in Headbands

Cover BFK Ghost Print Monotype

Codex binding

Books from class

Top: Buttonhole

Next: Codex

Next: Japanese Stab

Bottom: Coptic with sewn headbands

I have enjoyed the technical explorations that this class has allowed me to pursue. I have also enjoyed the creating a 3-d space out of essentially a 2-d medium.

Imperfection is beautiful. My art brings attention to the overlooked, unwanted, and unusual. Objects around me become inspiration for my work, and I often use materials found in the space around me in my pieces. I find limiting myself to what I have around me forces me to be more creative. 

I am an abstract artist. I love how one piece of art can be interpreted in thousands of different ways. For that reason, I generally have very little literal information in my pieces. Art can connect with people on a very deep psychological level, and I want to encourage that personal exploration through my work.

concept work

My work usually revolves around an idea to either fix something or create a useable object.  Simple mechanics help to create these objects.  This is my version of a magic wallet, made with found objects including a liscense plate and flat electrical cord.

Crystal Rose Lavoie

One thing that has always fascinates me is the unanswerable questions. For example: What is love? What is time? What fascinates me even more is how different people feel about such topics. I made a series of five books that each raise a different unanswerable question and include quotes from all types of people about what they think the topic means to them. I also incorporated my own photography and hand stitched them in. All of the text was done by tracing letter by letter. Here are my final photos.

Ellen's Primary Sketches

POSTISM

A Series of Four Books on Delightfully Dysfunctional Language

Artist Statement: My intent was to create a series of short books to highlight and even mock how modern day language has transformed and continues to evolve. The series has four volumes:

1) Slang

2) Filler & Overused Words

3) Acronyms

4) Abbreviations

The truth is these volumes are all interrelated, but I presented them in a way so that the viewer can see each category individually. The main idea of Postism was that 

the end result — Ellen Stoehr

Turns out, photos in the daylight aren't as bad at one might think.

These are all of the books I have made.

Bindings!

Hand set letterpress book

Japanese Stab Binding

Coptic Books!

Feet By Yours Truly.

Feet are interesting, there are many different meanings behind the word that range from measurements to table arrangements. I attempted to get a variety of shoes to visually show the diversity of feet, and then incorporate the text to show the broad range of meanings and abstract facts. All photographs were taken by myself, most of the text was from online sources like Wikipedia, Urban Dictionary, and various definitions.

And the nerdy picture for the closer.

The End.

Michael Anderson

I have a neighbor who is blind. Every once in a while I can hear him playing his music quite loudly. I thought to myself, 'What do blind people do for a living?'. This brought up the thought, 'What if my neighbor wanted to become a doctor?'. I decided to alter a book into a medical textbook for blind students. This book walks the student step by step on how to preform open-heart surgery. On the right page of the book, Braille describes to the student to process and the left page holds a three dimensional heart made out of clay to let them know different parts of a heart. I decided to make the book all white because this textbook is made for the blind.

Here are some more photos of my process from finishing my titles to getting everything set up to 4 and half hours of transferring my text.