Date
2022
Edition Size
unique
Media
Ink, Offset-Lithography, Rubbing, Turmeric pigment, Wax
Binding
Cloth case
Dimensions
36 × 28 × 1 in
Pages
16
Publisher
Organik
Collection
Collection Development, Unique Books$ 12,000.00
Unavailable
View Collectors
Trinity College
In 2010 Organik member C.K.Wilde received an archive of vintage sea-faring quality nautical maps that became the substrate for an amazing series of Organik artists’ book collaborations with various artists concerned with water including Keli Bowman (The Place Where the Sun is Born, in the map collection of the Pusey Library of Harvard University), Sto Len (Plague Chronicle, in the collection of the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art and Everything is for a Day, in the collection of Tufts University), and soon Christian Gfeller & Anna Hellsgård with a work in progress.
Turtle Island is the penultimate book in this well-loved series. It’s a huge, almost double-elephant-sized, book, created solely by the three co-founding Organik members: Kurt Allerslev (who did collage, rubbings, and painting), Marshall Weber (who did collage, rubbings, and painting), and C.K. Wilde (who did the initial map collages and all binding, collage, rubbings, painting, along with some inexplicable rubber stamping, and some media that we remain identified). The text and images are collaged rubbing from dozens of historical markers, memorial plaques, and architectural and organic surfaces from all over the United States. The book is collectively made and the rubbings were gathered through complicated logistics featuring intricate travel schedules that brought various members of Organik together over a 12-year period, while the book was shipped back and forth across the country on numerous occasions.
The book is a grateful and humble acknowledgment to the fact that all American live on Native land, and that all that land is shared with a multitude of other species.
The text for Turtle Island is a mash-up of rubbings from the New York Public Library’s Library Walk plaques, which are located on 41st Street Between Park and Fifth Avenues. A major fragment is from Albert Camus’ “The Plague”, and other fragments and words are sampled from plaque texts from the following writers: Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Jorge Luis Borges, Willa Cather, Isak Dinesen, Alfred Kazin, Garson Kanin, John Milton, Marianne Moore, Robert Pinsky, John Ruskin, Dylan Thomas, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, William Carlos Williams, Virginia Woolf.
Book object photography by Josh Klatt, NYC; Man in hoody poses by M. Weber; Instagram photo by Zoë Goehring