Poetry by Christine Kennedy
Calligraphy by Thomas Ingmire
Book structure by Kyoko Matsunaga
San Francisco, 2012
Unique book
4.125 x 10.25 inches, 50 pages
This project was originally a collaboration with Christine Kennedy, but ultimately evolved to include book artist, Kyoko Matsunaga, and composer/musician, Hide Takemoto. Christine created her poem as a response to an abstract calligraphic image that I had made while listening to music. She used a delightfully unique path to get to her poem. Working with the software program Abby Fine Reader, she scanned my "music" sheet in all four directions with the command to read it in English. This produced several pages of typographic symbols and fragments of words. Those sheets were run through Microsoft Word spell check and resulted in a collection of words, which then became the basis for her poem.
The poem, with its Japanese associations, led to my invitations to the other two artists. Kyoko created the fan-like structure which she has given the name "water-wheel binding. It can take many forms and is as much a sculpture as it is a book. Images of the book and the poem were then sent to Hide Takemoto, who lives in London. He responded with a composition titled "Honey Rain."
The book is currently available from Vamp and Tramp Booksellers.