Description
Live and work in Pennsylvania
About this piece:
While visiting Cape Cod, Thomas Parker Williams decided to video the bay at four times during the day: early morning, noon, afternoon, and sunset. The steady wind produced wave motion that suggested the rhythm of the suite of music, called “Cape Cod Bay – Light and Water,” that he composed soon after, followed by an artist book of the same name made by Williams and his wife, Mary Agnes Williams.
The music, a minimalist composition, has four sections: early morning, noon, afternoon, and sunset. The book, 16 leaves in all, adds a fifth section on the Long Point Lighthouse. Each section of the book includes a short essay, etchings with hand-applied washes, haiku relating to the time of day, hand-drawn waves, fragments of the original music score, and a linocut illustration, with oil-based pochoir and hand-painted accents, of light on water.
The book includes a USB thumb drive that contains the 16-minute video with audio, plus audio in several formats, and a PDF of the complete written score.
TPW – concept, design, illustrations, printing, binding, video, original music composition
MAW – concept, design, original essays and haiku, handset text
Materials:
book cloth, board, paper, dry pigments in burnt plate oil, relief ink, etching ink
About the artists:
Thomas Parker Williams and Mary Agnes Williams work in Philadelphia. Tom’s work includes printmaking, drawing, unique artist books and music composition. Mary Agnes is a writer, typesetter, and photographer, using pinhole cameras exclusively. Tom and Mary Agnes collaborate on making limited edition artist books under the imprint Luminice Press. They brainstorm ideas for books, drawing on astronomy, nature, history, literature, current events, and more. Tom illustrates and binds the books and composes and records original music compositions. Mary Agnes writes and/or selects text and handsets metal type. Together, they print the books on a letterpress that Tom designed and built. Their artist books are in more than 90 permanent collections, including the Library of Congress and the Watson Library of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
