Dwellings
By Rhiannon Alpers
San Francisco, California: Gazelle & Goat Press, 2019. Edition of 6 + 2 AP.

19 x 14 x 15 cm book with two compartments for objects. Foldable case. Handmade paper. Printed letterpress. Two tray compartment box with handmade bookcloth of dupioni silk in midnight purple and rust. Abaca cocoon sculpture nested in one tray. Accordion book in other compartment. Numbered and signed by the artist.

Rhiannon Alpers: "'Dwellings' investigates the imagined, built, and mended spaces we inhabit for our emotional safety. We as humans can’t dwell where we haven’t been. Conceptually speaking, our own dwellings (both spatially and mentally) change as we navigate our surroundings in the life cycle.

"This book attempts to materialize the personal process of creating a 'dwelling' to capture moments in time (both spatially and mentally). Deriving inspiration from natural seed pods, animal metamorphosis casings, and hummingbird nests the sculptural handmade paper pods were formed with wet sheets and either stitched with synthetic sinew if needed or left as they formed. The pods are purposefully small imperfect spaces with crevices fissures and multiple openings.

"Each book/box within varied edition book contains unique handmade paper abaca pod in the box structure. The multi-panel unfurling two tray compartment box is made of handmade dupioni silk bookcloth in midnight purple and rust, created by the artist. Both the compartments hinged trays open, one to reveal a nested cocoon sculpture made of over-beaten abaca nested and the other side to reveal a book cover containing letterpress panel poem, a colophon, and a loose over-beaten abaca accordion sculptural book in the other.

"The handmade paper, letterpress printed poem, and multi-panel box were created by Rhiannon Alpers. Quote inclusion by Susan Brind Morrow."

Excerpt from "The Names of Things" by Susan Brind Morrow.
        Words begin as description.
        are prismatic,
        vehicles of hidden,
        deeper shades of thought.
        You can hold them up at different angles until the light bursts through
        in an unexpected color.

Susan Brind Morrow, wikipedia 7/30/2021: "(born 1958) is an American author and poet. Morrow was born in Geneva, New York and attended Barnard College and Columbia University. Her first book, The Names of Things: A Passage in the Egyptian Desert, is 'travel writing and memoir threaded through with musings on the origins of words' which Annette Kobak says 'manages to unlock a sense of the awe and poetry our most ancient ancestors must have felt in naming things for the first time'."
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$850 (Last Copy, AP)