This book interrogates the journal as a private document to explore subjective experience, place, space, and feelings of belonging. Through this project I considered my own relationship with place and locality, recontextualizing texts written for public consumption by introducing privately written documents. The resulting conversation invites engagement with the book as a poetic, sculptural, and time-based medium.
The project uses Joan Didion’s essay On keep a Notebook, as well as several of Emily Dickinson’s poems written privately and refashioned for publication. The project is material in nature, beginning with the invasive and destructive act of unscrewing the book to enter a delicate interior space. A progression of intaglio printed top sheets range in legibility and offer an opportunity for variable interpretation.
