Susan Collard

Portland, Oregon

For me, numbers have definite, if elusive, personalities, which spring from their mathematical characteristics and other associations. I made these books as a series of character sketches, writing the text first and then creating abstract “portraits” for the numbers one through nine. Tally marks are the same text encrypted in a phonetic alphabet of my own devising (its form based on the early Celtic alphabet, Ogham). Acrylics, mixed media assemblage with children’s blocks, birch aircraft plywood, walnut, usu mino and Tyvek binding, woodburned maple covers

You Won’t See Me at the Anchor Inn

altered mixed media book with collage

3 1/4 x 2 1/2 x 1 1/4

© 2010

$400

Once in a while I still make a book from paper, and house it in a cloth-covered book board.

 

Work in Great Cities

altered mixed media book with collage

7 1/2 x 5 x 1

© 2011

sold

I liked this confident and expansive title, and imagined the book as a set of urban building blocks. I reconstructed the cover to contain and display basswood tiles collaged with industrial and architectural drawings, along with tiny blocks made from cut-down printing plates. Fragmented and movable, the tiles and blocks evoke the built elements and history of cities. Lines from the original text, six lectures on pastoral theology delivered by the Right Rev. Arthur F. Winnington Ingram, Bishop of London, in 1895, are collaged onto the tiles.

Altered book with collage and acrylics on basswood, with walnut, steel, copper, aluminum, bookcloth, usu mino paper, Tyvek, and commercial printing plates

 

Nested Book

mixed media assemblage

81/2 x 7 x 5

© 2005

$2300

Nested Book was designed to embody the theme “secrets and lies,” and does so by leading its viewer through encrypted texts and a series of secret compartments to a nested quartet of miniatures—three tiny books and a mirrored box. Made from rough reclaimed lumber and old hardware, the book suggests an eclectic and enigmatic history. Lines of a poem by the artist serve as the book’s text, and are first encountered in a phonetic alphabet woodburned into the opening page.

Collage, woodburning, and gouache on reused wood, with found hardware, zinc and copper printing plates, miniature wood and glass board books bound in usu mino paper and Tyvek

Boys' and Girls' Bookshelf, Volume I: Fun and Thought for Little Folk

altered book

9 1/2 x 7 1/2 x 1

© 2005

sold

Altered book with removable books. A bookshelf is built inside original 1912 cover, housing two plywood accordion-fold books. I tried to distill the original volume into a piece that hints, not at what I saw in the book, but at what I would have liked to see.

Fir, basswood, plywood, altered book, thread

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