A couple weekends ago while exploring Bainbridge Island with one of my best friends we stumbled upon the Bainbridge Art Museum during their grand opening of their new exhibit. This new exhibit was all book art! It was incredible to see the creativity of people in the area.

In total it took us 4 hours to walk through and read every exhibit. It was the hardest mental workout I had done in a long time. Every exhibit was full of life and personality, but it told a literal story with words while also being a work of art. Here is a sample picture of some of the exhibits.

Here  you can see some of the different art work. In the far back there is a carousel with different animals. Around the bottom it tells a story as it turns. There was a smaller version that told a story about demons.

Hanging up is a story about black women who washed clothes for a living. The creator wrote the story off of letters her grandmother sent to her. She used pictures of women washing clothes behind the quotes and sewed all the pictures to colorful fabric. From a distance it looks like clothes hanging on a clothing line. It was all so symbolic down to the tiniest details.

My favorite part was that a lot of the exhibits you had to walk around it or move it with your hand. There was the visual element of how it looked, a mental element with the words, and a physical interaction with it. It made me ponder how technology was made us loose a part of our interaction with stories since a swipe is less engaging than a full page turn.

When we finally made it to the end of the exhibit there was a room were we could make our own eraser poems. My friend and I gladly jumped on the opportunity after the hours of walking around. Inspired by what we had just seen creating these poems was a blast.

Evarosa’s Poem

But these factors themselves need to be accounted for.

Interestingly,

the origination,

the reason for this, can be assigned

to proper

random substitutions

uniquely determined.

It follows that

we may take

a

fall,

but the fall will be beautiful.

 

The eraser poems helped show that anyone can contribute to book art. There are many different ways to interpret what book art is. You can use books as art, tell a story through art, design an exhibit around people’s movement.

When we finished our poems we were featured on their social media post about the event! The hosts were incredibly nice and taught us a lot through the entire day.