Battery Kinzie

In a continuation of my efforts to making making books complicated and expensive, I spent the semester creating sketches, aquatinting plates, and doing layers and layers of printing in inks of differing colors and opacities.  Things learned: gamsol is an is the sort of smell that can really seep into your clothing, and washi is super resilient.  This was a wonderful project to learn on, and something I will certainly continue to experiment with now that I have nine huge copper plates that need to make their cost back.

The sketches and images are based on Battery Kinzie, a portion of Fort Wordon State Park in Port Townsend, Washington, which was once part of the Triangle of Fire along with two other forts around Puget Sound.  Nothing came to call from the frozen north, so these forts never saw battle.  Now they are overgrown and settled in the mud.  Fort Wordon State Park is one of my very favorite places on earth because it has a great mix of creepy, dank, concrete architecture and stunning ocean mountain views.

It's Japanese stab stitch, and I dip dyed the book cloth, which is made from Irish linen.  As you can see in the last photo, the idea of the long spreads was to mimic what Asian binding often does, which is have thin folded sheets, while not binding the second half of the fold in so the images can be viewed long way as well as regular pages.  It is aquatinted on Kitakata mitsumata paper.