Christopher Wilde

After Thought

Christopher Wilde

After Thought

Date

2019

Edition Size

1

Media

Collage, Etching, Handmade paper, Lithograph, Offset print

Binding

Coptic

Format

Artist Book

Dimensions

13.5 × 10.5 × 2 in

Publisher

Artichoke Yink Press

$ 14,000.00

Unavailable


View Collectors

Getty Research Institute

Materials: Fabriano, Sekishu, gold organza, decorative vinyl covers, shammy spine, paste, and PVA adhesives

This book started as a bookbinding demonstration at Kate’s Paperie on Broadway in New York City. I was working as a fine art paper salesman. The upper management saw my experience as a bookbinder as an asset to be exploited, and I love bind so it was a win/win situation. I got to select whatever papers I wanted to utilize, and on a busy Saturday I set up to bind what was ostensibly a wedding album. I folded, cut, punched, glued, and bound the whole book over the course of an afternoon. With management hovering nearby, I showed the patrons the rudiments of binding and directed them to my fellow salespeople to find the papers they desired.

At the end of the day, I was allowed to keep the book. I spirited it away to my closet apartment on third avenue and immediately began collaging in it. Over the next 20 years, I would work in it as a reliquary, a repository, a visual compendium. Techniques of gluing, tearing, punching, grommeting, and cutting all we’re played and experimented within this book. Ideas of revelation and obscuration in the codex were explored herein. Working out the mechanics of narrative; the structural engineering of expression.

A cornucopia of paper ephemera found a home on the pages: tickets, labels, stamps, currency, tags, photos, newspapers, magazines, etc. The story this book tells is one of restless, careful, loving exploration of the book as an artifact of experience. Personal and intimate, but revelatory and generous, this book shows its’ makers foibles, folly, passion, and happiness in the act of making art with paper in the book.

The cumulative effects of the collaged images (revealed by the careful reader) are playful, serious, sad, and delirious. The lush papers and overabundance of collected materials make this a time capsule of the paper age. Now electrons blaze the retinas: herein humble paper, ink, and glue tell the tale.
— CKW 2019