Grounded
Binding: Montage sur Onglets
Materials:
Dimensions: 12” X 17” housed in a decorated clam shell box
Being “grounded” by the pandemic, I was inspired to make this Artist Book on the remarkable sailing ship, the Invincible that ran aground near Portsmouth England, February 19, 1758. Being grounded the ship’s expected fate changed, not unlike the impact of the events of Covid changing the lives of people today. It stimulates us to think about the fragility of life and the human condition, the challenges we face, conflicts that arise and the desire to ascribe blame for what befalls us. Ironically it has a Canadian link with the historic French-English divide and conflicts over time.
The book includes text pages, images of selected historic documents, photo etchings made for the book, and artifacts recovered from wreckage site (wood, rigging rope, iron gall ink, fragment of a leather hat brim, part of a shoe sole). The cover is wood with a small barrel stave recovered from the ship on the left side and a piece of actual rigging rope, also recovered from the sunken ship. The raised letters of the title were hand-cut out of ebony wood and the small monochrome image is of a photo-etching showing the grounded ship.
