Description
Lives and works in Vermont
About this piece:
What does cold or hot mean if not connected to a numerical temperature? What does a sky look like when it’s cold to the point of freezing? Does the sky look different when it’s extremely hot? Do descriptions of the air bring a particular sky to mind? Or a specific feeling?
Of the Air contains weather notations drawn from the almanacs of a 19th century N.J. woman, Anna Blackwood Howell, which were kept from the early 1800s until her death in 1855. Tiny watercolor paintings interpret and imagine skies of the temperature these words meant to evoke.
Though Howell never noted temperatures in degrees, her reports about the land, the day’s outlook, agricultural events, and her personal feelings perhaps convey more through her use of language, than anything numbers might have made known.
An additional set of the letterpress printed pages is provided as cards, to allow for a reader to create their own translation of words into a visual representation, whether a single person mounts their own paintings, or the cards reproduced for multiple iterations of the process.
Original watercolors painted by the artist.
Materials:
paper, ink, board, bookcloth, watercolor
About the artist:
Stephanie Wolff is an artist, hand bookbinder, printer, and book conservator. She was the Fall 2015 Helen M. Salzberg Artist-in-Residence at the Jaffe Center for Book Arts. In 2013 she was awarded a Creative and Performing Artists and Writers Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society. Her current body of work focuses on themes of weather, history, and rural life. Her artist books are held in library and private collections and included in 500 Handmade Books, Volumes 1 & 2. In addition to working on her own creative projects, she teaches book arts to students of all ages.
