Art > Curiosities and Investigations

This work was guided by a reading of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. I compiled a word frequency list of every organism mentioned in the book, and sorted those 768 words and names into categories. Then I designed a long, spiraling book of triangular gessoed pages—and, OK, that approach proved unlovely, and the logic of its sequencing intractable. The deadline for the Guild of Book Workers Formation exhibition was fast approaching.

Out of the hundreds of life forms Darwin mentioned in making his case for natural selection, I chose thirty-six animals that were both significant to his argument and illustrated in Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. I cut thirty-six triangles out of mirrors.