Zea Morvitz

I find the book form endlessly inspiring. A book of multiple pages is an opportunity for me to work in a serial way, from page to page. I like to place text and image in the same visual field. This sets up a word-image interaction as handwritten words become images, and drawings can be read like words. A book is a real working tool and its history as an object in the world is always present in any book-art-form. The book has been re-invented many times, and this encourages me to re-work the old structures and try out new ones.

Some of the books I make are small, meant to be held in the hand and experienced individually, then passed to other hands. I also use mass-produced books for wall pieces. Each one is painted over so that its original content is more or less obliterated. Then I work into these prepared surfaces, which are still recognizable as opened books.

When I work with the book form the notion of a palimsest is often in my thoughts. (A palimsest is a page that has been scraped so that the original text is erased to allow a new text to be inscribed.) I feel that all the artwork, all the productions of human culture overlay one another, layer over layer, with even the oldest layers bleeding through into the present. I like the density of the palimsest, and in my work I often write and write over, erase and draw over, erase and write over again.

I work primarily in graphite, watercolor, acrylic and ink.