![[Spine] Ode to Atsuo](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e67e75a9db099bec977524/1509062031323-A36SVMPJTQHF2KICI49M/epic-ode-to-atsuo.jpg)
Altered Books by Jacqueline Rush Lee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_book
Image: CLOUDSCAPE FOR ANONYMOUS
Book Stain Imprint of Atsuo's Japanese Dictionary.
...While Ex Libris invokes a recognition of change on a geological scale, Epic is the fossil record, marking the fleeting, anonymous impact of individual organisms…It is an homage to these attempts to delay decay, to the small marks that people leave in the world..” From essay excerpt, “Jacqueline Rush Lee: The Fossils and Skeletons Books Leave Behind,” Elizabeth Wadell
In Epic my work moves from books as printed matter to the residual imprints made by books in the casting process; inspired by the marginalia that I found in collecting texts for my works. Each panel is cast in gypsum cement into which books, along with marginalia and ex libris ownership are pressed into the wet plaster. As the plaster heats and sets up, the books are removed, leaving behind concave imprints, bleeding stains of colour, threads from frayed bindings. .
."These residual images, within the frame of cool white plaster, have an elusive but compelling aura, like the poignant memory of a dream, or the visual echo of a half-remembered poem. Each by itself has an exquisite intimacy; together they form a kind of open-ended narrative, a musing on things we have possessed and lost, and things we have let go, only to have them return in another time, another form... " Marcia Morse VII Biennial essay