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Surrounded by Water
Author/s: K. Allerslev, M. Weber, C.K. Wilde
Edition: Single Object
Year:2009
Surrounded by Water collides imagery and text rubbed from memorial plaques, walls, streets, and buildings in New York City (New Amsterdam) and Amsterdam, Netherlands. Using graphite and wax rubbing blocks, the artists compose complicated and layered compositions and design alternative typographic structures from found surfaces. Using strategies of both poetry concrete, formed poetry, and found text manipulation the book, Surrounded by Water explores the deeper metaphorical connections between the Dutch colonists and the history of New York City. The images, created by careful rubbing, deboss the opposite side of the page, taking trace samplings from the point of creation; the book is literally embedded with pieces of Old and New Amsterdam, mixing elements on each page alongside the imagery and text(ural) collage. Surrounded by Water takes on the issue of Early Dutch American identity, and its testy relationship to European and global history. It enigmatically mixes slavery and ruination with references to the ecological disasters and human ingenuity associated with living near and on water.
The pages are Beeholder Genetic Signature double hand watermark formed from hemp and cotton fibers, and Shadwell from W.S.H.Hamady's barn. Several different leathers were used for the casing; two jackets from the binder's sister and mother, a piece of Argentine purple, and Algerian goat in mustard, and some crazy red leather from Booklyns open studios. The casing was blind stamped using a steel movie spool. This is the first book to be finished in the new California studio, a 1931 bank replete with walk in vault.
In the Anderson Library collection of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
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