Metamorphosis
Alice went down the rabbit hole and emerged a different sort of girl. A man goes to bed and wakes up as a cockroach. The hungry caterpillar eats his way through the pages and emerges a butterfly. Books have the capacity to transform both in their very structure and in metaphor, with the ultimate goal of transforming the person reading them - for who amongst us has not been changed by a book? Through books, a person in Idaho can visit Rome, and a little boy can imagine himself the heroine of an adventure story, a little girl following a very tardy white rabbit through a magical land. Books allow us to see the changes we cannot undo to the earth and water around us - a reminder that not all transformation is good and our ability to change things can come with a price.
Artists use this transformational aspect of books in order to engage with us, both literally and figuratively. Their books require us to participate and ask (or sometimes demand) that we examine the world and our place in it.
Magical Naturescapes: An Adventure in Anaglyph 3-D
Rom, Rome
A Passage
Myriorama: Collection of Many Thousand Landscapes
Game consisting of 16 hand-colored aquatint cards, each with an illustration of a different scene. The sixteen plates may be fitted together in various combinations to form varied landscapes. No matter in what order the plates are arranged, the scene is always continuous.
The Prairies
The Prairies is a rumination on the past, what was a pristine landscape transformed into an ecosystem endangered by the sins of our fathers. The text is comprised of a timeline of historical facts describing the demise of the landscape and stanzas from the poem “The Prairies” by William Cullen Bryant celebrating the plains.
“Untitled.”
“Untitled (Peep Show)” opens to reveal a scene inside the bellows of a deep mossy well. The photographs for this project were taken by Gaskell at the Netherworld Well on the grounds of Villa Regaleira in Sintra, Portugal, built in the late 19th century. The design of the well and the surrounding gardens is based on Dante's Inferno.
Threshold
Threshold is a book about approaching and moving through transformation. The piecerevolves around a story inspired by Ovid’s tale of Daphne and Apollo in The Metamorphosis. Daphne is a nymph with a passion for hunting; she is pursued by Apollo, the god of sunlight, music, poetry, and healing. His Delphic edict is gnothi seautón, know yourself. He chases her through the forest and rather than be caught, she pleads for a transformation and is turned into a laurel tree.
The book also features four Mythological Meta-Muses of Flux. These are muses who embody a threshold between states of being; they are muses of the imagination who assist in creative journeys of transformation. The book ismade to be turned and read. The border reads a continual refrain of There is no Fixed Self. The alcoves beneath the map move from day to night, expressing our constant state of change through time.