Item #36455 Prism. Helen Hiebert, book artist.
Prism
Prism
Prism
Prism
Prism
Prism

Prism

Red Cliff, CO: Helen Hiebert Studio, 2019. Number 20 of 25 copies signed and numbered by the book artist. Helen Hiebert is a noted paper artist who constructs installations, sculptures, artists’ books and works in paper using handmade paper as her primary medium. She teaches, lectures and exhibits her work internationally and online, and is the author of the several how-to books about papermaking and papercrafts.

She says of this beautiful and complex work: "I’ve been fascinated with light for as long as I can recall. As a child, I always looked for rainbows, and I enjoyed trying to identify every color, from red to violet. Sir Isaac Newton was the first person to articulate the science of a rainbow. In 1665, he observed that when white light passed through a triangular prism, it dispersed into seven colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. This book explores the wonder of that interaction between color and light. As you flip through the pages, you will see 24 analogous colors (each new hue sharing some of the color of the page next to it). It’s my attempt, as a paper artist, to capture the essence of a rainbow within the pages of the book. My medium is handmade paper, and for over 25 years, I have been exploring the properties of abaca, a fiber from a non-fruit bearing banana plant. I processed the abaca fiber to create a translucent paper that resembles frosted glass. I spent a long time contemplating how to achieve a rainbow of paper and performed several color-mixing experiments. My process centered around determining how to accurately produce the spectrum by mixing pigments into wet paper pulp. After several trials, I ended up matching 24 colors on a chart that gradually change from red to orange, yellow to green, blue to indigo and finally to violet, with several colors in between each hue. All 54 pages plus the cover are stitched together into a single signature allowing the soft deckled edges of the colors to meet at the fire-edge, blending and transitioning from one to the next as colored light does in the rainbow."

The front and back text pages show the abaca paper in its natural hue. The cover is a cotton/abaca blend with a pulp painting in abaca. Text was letterpress printed by Tom Leech at the Press at the Palace of the Governors in Sante Fe from polymer plates made by Boxcar Press. The typefaces are Dante and Futura. Claudia Cohen created the blue cloth covered box with white and colored spine label. In fine condition. Box size: 12 1/2 x 9 1/2 x 1 inches. Book size (closed): 12 x 9 inches.

Item #36455

Price: $2,400.00

See all items in Artists' Books
See all items by ,