Captive to the Book

The title of this project, ‘Captive to the Book' or ‘i/Eye Book', reflects both the omnipresence of the human eye as a physical attribute in each of the paintings, as well as the prominent role of the self in the form of the artist as creator of art from her own life, and the self of the viewer as participant observer. This is the third in an ongoing series of projects tracing the artistic relationships between a creator and what is created, via an intermediary. I am currently in the final stages of publishing a first novel and this recent series of art works acts as a parallel rewriting of this in a visual medium. In this set of pieces, the principal motif is that of the autobiographical novel and the extent to which its author can maintain control over her text whilst under the threat of its usurping her own identity.

The project is made up of nine images: four depicting the single eye of the author/artist, four based on the whole face, sometimes suggesting a mask and with prominence given to eyes, and culminating in the representation of a single, non-human eye, which can either be taken as a starting point or a point of departure.

Each of these eight ‘eye portraits' plays with the idea of the author sandwiched between the covers of her book, her own creation, and what this suggests about the relationship between the creator and the created. The book belongs to the author’s life, but in being a book of life it can become something greater than its author, who can only be a part of it, and whose identity can be subsumed by what she has created. Each portrait posits the author in varying degrees of control over the book which surrounds her, and invites the viewer to consider their own story and how this might be either disseminated or distorted through the medium of the book.

Framing each eye portrait is a book whose pages are individually tailored to their ‘owners'. Rather than use mass-produced paper, each set of pages has its own unique colour, texture and arrangement, each fold in the paper denoting the twists of fate specific to the story of that individual. One might be doggedly engaged in determined combat in order to successfully tell her story, whilst another’s burnt eye indicates she has enjoyed less success in doing so. Similarly, the symbolism behind individual colour schemes in the single-eye portraits reinforce the unique narrative vision and experience of each subject.