Laura Wait: "Words as image are a central part of my imagery in paintings, book arts, and prints, leading to my current obsession with letterforms and wall writing.
"I use encaustic to create ancient obscured surfaces with layers of ink writing on Japanese paper saturated with color, scraped to reveal an inner texture, or scratched with lines to make new imaginary figures or handwriting. My goal is to create dense, ancient, fresco like surfaces.
"My work evolves in series, whether pages of a book or a group of paintings, investigating visual aspects of a symbol or idea. My painted books are made with collographs, intaglio & woodcut printing as well as paint and writing in many layers to achieve a rich and unexpected surface, each book unique." |
"Volute" or Chronos Isochronism
By Laura Wait
Steamboat Springs, Colorado: Laura Wait, 2008. Series of 9.
6.75 X 13.5"; 9 folds. Solar plate intaglio, collograph, handwriting, and painting. First printed with intaglio plates on an etching press, using Rives BFK paper with Graphic Chemical etching ink. Collographs and woodcuts of spirals and labyrinths were printed in color with Akua ink on top of the black. Acrylic paste painting and ink writing completed the pages. Bound in the drum leaf style. Woodcut stamped on the calf leather spine. Paste paper over boards made from the collographs from the book. Housed in a clamshell box with paste paper liners. Jill Bergman assisted with the printing, binding, and box-making.
One in a series of nine unique books by Laura Wait celebrating the essential cyclical nature of art, agriculture, and the universe.
Laura Wait: "Symbolism, mythology, and abstract geometry are the main intellectual content of my abstract paintings, prints and books. Words as image play an important part in all my work, acting as pattern, texture, and occasionally content. The diverse media I use is incorporated into my unique artist books, including prints which are often cut up and reformatted into parts of books. The books act as inspiration for the paintings and prints. The book pages sometimes act as studies for larger paintings….Recently, I have been inspired by nature, and the geometric forms man creates in the fields, as well as the detail and tangle of the grasses which remind me of writing and drawing."
From the last page of Volute: "Time repeats itself in the rituals associated with spirals and labyrinths. Theses universal symbols of the earth and its cyclical seasons are found throughout history. Nature and mathematics also form many spiral shapes."
We are reminded of the walls of Troy, Greek labyrinths, the Fibonacci sequence, Troy, Jericho, the rock carvings of Val Carmonica.
The book inspires hyperbolic comparisons: If Blake could see the world in a grain of sand, Volute is like holding the time in your hand.
$2,750
|
Click image for more
Click image for more
|
