Lives Unwritten

I know I have a solo exhibition coming up. I know the work isn't done. I know I should be concentrating on this.....but....I couldn't help myself. For some reason, Lives Unwritten just had to be created. I guess the experience at the SABA conference called for me to tea-stain watercolor paper and use the buttonhole stitch on the edges of the pages. The binding is what I call "album" but I think it is more correctly called Japanese side binding (?) Whatever!

The piece is more a "small sculpture" than a book. It simply sits, fanned out. The words are all collaged letters from a late 19th c. book; I think it was about the Chicago Exposition. The eight vintage photographs were bought in an antique shop in Angels Camp, California. They were mounted exactly alike and must have been from the same, unknown family. They caught my eye because of they were so obviously a "group", a "family"....but they'd been forgotten, undocumented, unloved, abandoned.

Thus, the book is constructed with eight pockets for the photographs. Between each image is a page with the lettering....Birth....Confirmation...Married...Divorced or Widowed or Remarried....Gave birth to or Parent of....Lived at or Moved to or Settled in....Employed by or Retired from....Date of Death....Survived by. Basically, the phrases one might complete in order to document one's life, but these people have "Lives Unwritten".




I absolutely have no "Vs" left from this vintage source for letters!