The Tide’s Story Project is an international collaboration illustrating Marshall Weber’s poem of the same title. Multi-lingual calligraphy flows through an abstracted bottom-of-the-seascape, interrupting the conventional act of reading and translation and thus renewing the practices of reading and writing as overt parts of the aesthetic experience.

The painting and calligraphy integrate with the subject matter and the book form and function. The metaphorical components of salty blood, ink, and seawater suggest the exchange of communication and the actions of the waves and wind replicated in the actual book design engage the reader both physically and intellectually in the production of waves- the primary form of material movement of light, sound, heat, and liquid.

2016, 10″ x 14’, codex

Spanish translation and calligraphy: Eliana Perez, binding Sara Parkel
Page dyeing, poem, and Engish calligraphy: Marshall Weber
Painting and mono-printing: Kurt Allerslev, Christopher Wilde,
Photo-copying: Christopher Wilde and Marshall Weber
Direct laser copied pages joined in a scroll from original artworks made with pen and ink, watercolor, aspiration, acrylic, mono-print, ink painting, and dying.
On Hanamuhle Ingre paper

The Tide’s Story

please

hold me with both of your hands
tightly
so we both feel the exchange
of blood and ink

let us stare at each other
relentlessly in endless
yet silent
conversation

this is the life we share

contracted
by the death of beings
gentler than ourselves
 
quiet and swaying
they bequeathed infinite
universes

with paths as numerous and varied
as their roots
as profound
as the dark earthen depths
to which those tendrils
plunged

life’s anchor
securing the laden vessel
holding sails to the sky
and pages to the sun
floating in the sea of words

each water drop a letter
each wave a word
                        a sentence
                                    a paragraph
all telling
the tide’s story