The second altered book is more destruction than repair and more geography than history so they make a somewhat appropriate pair.
While visiting my boyfriend at Bard College we went out into the woods to climb around in a rocky waterfall area and wound up going to a little tributary of the Hudson to skip stones, which I am terrible at because I grew up in an area where rocks are exotic. Among the flaky rocks on the banks I found a few little red stones that reminded me of the ones Andy Goldsworthy used in Rivers and Tides to color stones and water in a stream. And whether or not they were the same kind of stone, they had similar properties; we could write on the rocks with them and grind them to dust against other stones.
I tried to fill my pockets with the little red rocks, until I found another strange object in the water that reminded me of a shark’s egg case or an anemone, which Matthew insisted was from a plant and joked was filled with spiders, and then I came across a large pile of them and assumed they must have fallen from a tree. However, upon later research they turned out to be water caltrops washed up on the bank, which, surprisingly, are edible when cooked, but I doubted the ones I found were suitable for eating. I stuffed my pockets with these as well but had to put them in my backpack because their thorns were digging into my thigh.
I bought a blank Wilson Jones S300 record book in a thrift shop for a dollar a few years ago and occasionally used it for to-do lists. I decided to carve a hole in the center of the book and place the stones and seed pods inside. First, to give more a sense of river-ness, and to soften the paper for easier carving, I soaked the book in hot Pu-Erh tea and salt. I cut a shallow niche in the middle of the book just large enough to hold the objects then brushed the inside and outside edges with PVA glue.
I smashed the stones with a hammer and ground the dust into the divot, and covered everything else in Konacha tea to resemble moss (it should be actual moss, as this feels like cheating, but the tea smells nice.) The remaining pieces of stone and five water caltrops were placed into the hole. The spine was re-glued to the side of the book block and the back cover was glued down so it could not be opened. I also wrote HUDSON on the cover in glue and poured the ground rock over it and rubbed the outer surfaces with the remaining red powder.
[Update: the book grew mold a week later and was thrown out.]
Tags: altered books, andy goldsworthy, annandale-on-hudson, art, bard college, bookbinding, brooklyn, hudson, new york, pratt institute, sophomore, undergrad, united states
