Artist Books
Stephanie Damoff
Chiasma
These sculptural bookforms challenge perception, as well as ways of thinking and experiencing the world. As narrative structures they are flexible, bending back, reflecting and augmenting what has come before. Our everyday experience with the world—our bodily engagement with it—follows the twists and turns of the attention, reacting to stimuli, narratives arcing; moment by moment we breathe the world in and become new. These chiasmic books double back again and again, reflecting the position of the viewer in the world. The viewer moves intentionally through (along) the lines of the book, opening and closing pages and reordering the composition, neither progressing nor regressing, just being, experiencing, perceiving. The body absorbs and gives back. The books in this cyanotype chiasma series can be folded into more possible configurations than I can count. The book covers are made of cotton construction paper and pigmented kozo. They are sections of a large pour (8’ x 12’) handmade paper sheet made by my class in a workshop at Women’s Studio Workshop in 2019 led by Hong Hong. We divided the finished sheet among ourselves at the end of class.
Sine Out of Time (2021)
Chiasma/Reflecting (2021)
© 2008-