Hand lettered and gilt accordion book with acid etched copper covers
Media, social media, art medium… When Marshall McLuhan stated, "The Medium is the message,” he could hardly have predicted all of what we now call media. My long-time desire to incorporate the quote and my own media of the moment met when I dyed a long piece of calfskin vellum in purple brazilwood dye with the intention of making a gilded book.
Combining the prophetic line with 1200 year old illumination techniques was an irresistible contrast. It’s my quirky and ironic sense of humor, coupled with my intense love of complex processes. Within the choices of lettering and shapes lie many more contrasting concepts: East/West, positive/negative, the use of word as image, and the drawn eye, with all its traditional symbolism, that I placed over the stark elongated Romans which I cut out of the vellum.
“The Medium” is lettered in a hand I developed and call "Varabian." It’s based on a style of Arabic writing, and serves here as a gentle reminder that much of what we call Western civilization comes via the knowledge that was reverently preserved by Eastern and Middle Eastern scholars and brought back to Europe through the Crusades.
Books are intimate. Their form promises that the invited will be given sought after information. In this case, the book is purely reflexive. Ideas may be free, but information comes at a price, and awareness of the two is as old as the myths of Genesis and as new as your most recent internet service provider bill.