sheet 0, I & II
„Knowing I lov’d my books,
he furnish’d me from mine own library
with volumes that I prize
above my dukedom.
A Book of Water
This is a waterproof-covered book
which has lost its colour
by much contact with water.
It is full of investigative drawings
and exploratory text
written on many different
thicknesses of paper.
There are drawings of every
conceivable watery association,
seas, tempests, streams, canals,
shipwrecks, floods and tears.
As the pages are turned,
there are rippling waves
and slanting storms.
Rivers and cataracts flow and bubble.
Bound in a gold cloth and very heavy,
this book has some eighty
shining mirrored pages,
some opaque, some translucent,
some manufactured with silvered papers,
some covered in a film of mercury
that will roll off the page unless treated cautiously.
Some mirrors simply reflect the reader
as he will be in a year’s time,
as he would be if he were a child, a monster, or an angel.
When the pages are opened in this book,
plans and diagrams spring up fully-formed.
There are definitive models of buildings
constantly shaded by moving cloud-shadow.
The Book of Colours
This is a large book bound in watered silk.
300 pages cover the colour spectrum
In finely differentiated shades
moving from black back to black again.
This Anatomy of Birth,
a second volume, is even
more disturbing and heretical.
It is full of descriptive drawings
of the workings of the human body
which, when the pages open,
move and throb and bleed.
It is a banned book
that queries the unnecessary
processes of ageing,
nd generally questions the efficiency
of God.“
The series THE TEMPEST is based on text of the play by William Shakespeare and the associated script to the movie “Prospero’s books” by Peter Greenaway.
I selected the two parts “A book of water” and „The book of colours“. The 28 consecutive pages reflect the surface, the glitter, the mirroring and the transparency of water. I have implemented the text with classic typography and my own handwriting, and the colours with watery ink, acrylic and varnish.
My summer project 2022 started in Greece – the incredibly clear water of the sea and rivers shimmering in all shades of blue is my inspiration and longing.
