The visual compositions were made by hand at the Grand Marais Art Colony in Minnesota, where I spend a week every summer. They are mostly made of cut-up serigraphs (which were printed in my basement). At that time I was doing a lot of thinking about teaching a 2D Foundations course for the first time, and was trying to go “back to basics” with the compositions, tying them together as a series though the circle found on each one. When I lined them up, they reminded me of book covers.

I decided to scan each piece into my computer and add type in InDesign. The interior of the books are empty. In some ways the lack of complete manuscript within became a reflection on how “creative activity” is (or sometimes isn’t) valued as academic research: professors often feel pressure to write books and scholarly articles and some assessment models fail to understand the hours of work and research that result in a piece of art or design. As with most of my creative work, the implied subject matter—aging, motherhood, personal relationships, career concerns, bureaucratic frustrations, nostalgia—is both personal and, I hope, somewhat universal.