susanna bauer

My friend Shoshannah Wineburg is a bookbinder and an interior designer and one day early last year sent me a link from her Pinterest page showing a recent pin from Timothy Ely’s page. Mr. Ely is an artist, painter, and a bookbinder and his Pinterest page focuses on stunning examples of people’s work mostly related to artist books, books made into art, and art made from books and their materials. His personal statement is: “A book is not an isolated being: A book is a swirl of syntax, an axis of innumerable relationships (Apologies to Jorge Luis Borges)” I immediately started to follow him on Shoshannah’s recommendation, and very soon after one of the artists he featured was Susanna Bauer. I didn’t need to see more than one piece of Susanna’s work to know that I would love everything she makes. Her work fascinates because of the materials she uses, but it’s her compositions that make me continue to look and marvel. I want to go to a whole forest where her kind of nature exists. Susanna graciously said yes to have her work in this book and anytime I’ve shown her piece, Transplant no. 7 from the book to anyone, they all say, “wow.”

From Susanna’s artist statement on her site:
“I work with found natural objects. Leaves, stones, pieces of wood…ephemeral things, easily overlooked.

And I use crochet; sometimes as embellishment, but mostly in a more unconventional way as a means of sculpture and construction.

There is a fine balance in my work between fragility and strength; literally, when it comes to pulling a fine thread through a brittle leaf or thin dry piece of wood, but also in a wider context — the tenderness and tension in human connections, the transient yet enduring beauty of nature that can be found in the smallest detail, vulnerability and resilience that could be transferred to nature as a whole or the stories of individual beings.”

Susanna has a show with Leigh Anne Lester at the Muriel Guepin Gallery in New York City until April 16, 2016, and I can’t wait to see her work in person.

http://www.murielguepingallery.com/exhibitions/natural-order
http://www.susannabauer.com/

https://www.pinterest.com/timothyely315/

melinda tidwell

Seeking visual examples for the pages of Your Idea Starts Here, I first started looking for collage artwork. I loved the idea of using a medium that uses different materials layered together to make something new. I started searching (very scientifically) for the right type of work by googling: “beautiful collage artwork,” and found Melinda Tidwell in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Melinda's work brings together order and abstraction from her mathematical past with fabulous color and juxtapositions, using vintage books as her material.

For the book, I commissioned Melinda to make collages based on the words gather, break, and build. Here is her composition for gather. And below, Melinda writes about her work:

“In the beginning, I was inspired by paperback book covers as a material — I was already doing collage with magazine pages, and the book covers just seemed much more interesting, especially the old, tattered ones.  I would choose a group of colors that I thought looked good together, and start cutting shapes and rearranging them on a clean background.  Later I began to use the type, words, images, and would do a lot of doctoring to my elements — but it is still these little interactions between the colored shapes that gives me the most juice. They begin to speak to one another and I love that process of trying to get ALL the elements to be contributing to a single, viable, conversation.  There is continual surprise about what makes a piece work and it is completely challenging.”

http://www.melindatidwell.com/