Libri The Douglas F. Cooley Memeorial Art Gallery , Reed College 1997

Flos Cinis Interior View

Libri is a library of organic forms and their ghost images. Formally this work references a herbarium, a structure created to organize and preserve the temporal. In this exhibition, both the image of the destroyed object and the object itself are preserved and rendered museographic. To accurately record the organic originals in this collection, the renderings were generated from rubbings of living plants. Paper casts were made of a felled fir tree and the planks result from milling the fir tree after the skins were cast. These rubbings are stains of the organic form. The casts are recordings of impressions of the living thing. Unlike taking a photograph, making a rubbing or a casting is to touch the object rather than merely to view it. Recording these objects by taking their direct impressions was done to preserve them before they decayed. Placing the original organic form in direct relationship to the image calls attention to its inevitable disappearance.

Opposite page: Libri Installation View Betula Pendula- Silver Birch Nine graphite drawings. (8’ x 20”) Betula Pendula-Latin, Genus Betula- Birch. Species Pendula- Silver. Velieris- Skins Nine rice paper casts of fir log. (8 x Various width 12” - 18”) Velieris- Latin, meaning hide, fleece, skin. Traba- Timber Nine milled planks froma vertical grain fir log. (8 x Various width 12” - 18”) Traba- Latin, meaning beam of wood, timber, tree trunk, ship, table.

Libri Installation view Douglas F. Memorial Art Gallery 1997

By mounting, encasing and displaying these forms in an orderly format, I strive to elevate the common. To enshrine these ordinary forms I drew from two 16th century German structures made to house nature’s bounty. The first is a 16th century herbarium at the Nationalmuseum in Munchen. It is a six foot by six foot oak wall cabinet. The shelving and glass doors that are positioned at two foot increments create a grid. The cabinet contains hundreds of boxes made from the wood and the bark of a tree. Each box contains the blossom, the seed pod, the leaf and branch of that same tree.

Some of these boxes sit closed on the shelves so one can read the Latin name given to the plant, while others stand open so one can see the organizational method and the organic forms in various stages of decay. Libri was fabricated for The Doglas F. Cooley Memeorial Art Gallery from 1995 thru 1997. Libri- Latin. m. inner bark of a tree; book; volume. Birch bark or planks of wood were used by the early Romans for writing texts. According to the historian Pliny, the books of Numa Pompilius, one of the earliest kings of Rome, were written on birch bark.

Flos cinis- The flower turns to dust Interior view. Chamber containing drawings on rice paper in steel frames. The drawing/plant pressings were created over the course of two years. Most of the plants were collected from my grandmother’s garden in Germany. (12’ x 12’ x 12’). Flos cinis- Latin, The flower turns to dust. This phrase was translated by Erasmus, Adagia 1559, who takes the saying to signify “The fleetingness of human life. Youth flourishes today, tommorow it will be in the grave.” And, according to the prophet, “all flesh is as the grass.”