Another time pictures saved my life. My knee [had] swollen to the size of a melon and I was lying in a hospital. Such despair. How to recover and then cope with the mountain of medical paperwork? In a fever the idea emerged swimming in heat. ‘I will do as people have done for centuries – seek restoration as a pilgrim.’ Blue History is a record of that walk to Santiago twelve years ago. I used a staff – I am not young. It transformed the conceptual scale of my work from single images to step-by-step series of panoramas that now stretch to hundreds of feet of paintings, drawings, and prints.

Why, then, books? Because, she says, “I appreciate the special mechanics of books – where information is revealed over time… the opposite, shall we say, of a subway poster or a sound byte. The reader/viewer actually does much of the heavy lifting of invention unconsciously – by mentally stacking tiers of pictures, dialogue, and description to eventually make their own version from the given elements. This creation hovers somewhere outside above the book or the frame… very subjective, very inclusive.”

The books are often small and intimate, say 4 x 6 inches, easy to hold in the hand. Then, on opening one up – slowly, carefully – they can extend to as long as 10 feet. To show you how this works we present three of her pieces. For each, you will see stills followed by an image you can manipulate as slowly as you would if you were exploring the physical book. Breathtaking.