Surface Incidents, by Cherith Lundin
According to Cherith Lundin, the handcrafted artist book Surface Incidents (created this year in an edition of 50) began from an intentional reshuffling of some of the piles of raw material that inhabit her studio space—materials that she often finds “quietly carrying on conversations behind the scenes from one table top to the next.”
In this case, those image fragments, scraps of paper, and studies for other work began to coalesce around a postcard of Botticelli’s Annunciation that she had acquired years prior. The pages of the book are digital reproductions of these impromptu assemblages that reference the various motifs within both the Botticelli and Lundin’s larger body of work—specifically, the interplay of shadow and light, the role of framing in defining focus, and the sanctity of place as expressed through architecture.
Like the annunciation story itself, Surface Incidents suggests a multilayered creative process that harnesses a rich and textured materiality, simultaneously highlighting one episode within a larger narrative and clearing a space to be celebrated as a worthy end in and of itself.
