the book of red

I was digging through some old blog entries from 2005 and was reminded of my very first official attempt at an artist book.  I had been doing some collage and text-based installations in the library for a couple of years, but was still super clueless about what I was doing, my entire education having been devoted to words and language and outside of a scene painting class where I did a lot of faux-bois, none at all to visual arts. That spring, I was invited (by Lauren Levato Coyne, who would eventually be my collaborator on the Cornell project.) to be a part of an upcoming Woman Made Gallery show called "Sacred Places, Sacred Spaces."  I'd been working on a longer poem devoted to Little Red Riding Hood (which also appeared a couple years later in my feign chapbook) and thought it might make a cool piece to expand into an artists book incorpoporing text and collage. At times, it seemed I would never finish it--portions of it typed, others handwritten.  Outside of the library installations, it was my first serious attempt to bring the visual and written together.  I'd taken a Book & Paper Center workshop the previous summer, and was already collageing up a storm, but they were still two distinct things in my head that did not overlap.  I've been doing a lot of reproduced limited run projects and zines, but haven't done as many one offs that aren't more sculptural than literary and would love to work more in singular pieces, or maybe multiple pieces but more hand wrought objects...