sams creek counting book...

 

sams creek counting book

for BookArtObject Edition 4

laser print on Magnani Revere

Canson Mi-Teintes fold and slit covers

sumi ink and creek water on Bemboka* paper spine

edition of 15

Sams Creek Counting Book - was created in response to the story title 'knowledge'  taken from 'an exercise for Kurt Johannessen' by Sarah Bodman. 

For more than 20 years I've lived beside the tiny watercourse - Sams Creek - I've been playing next to (and IN) the creek all my life - it might be a small and insignificant creek to others, but to me it is the most important waterway in the world. 

Many of you already know that for the past few years I've been quietly working on my MFA project - a part of what I've been thinking as I've been researching, writing and making is the nature of knowledge - in particular, the differences between tacit and explicit knowledge. Tacit, or experiential knowledge is something hard to quantify and almost impossible to transmit through written instructions - swimming, riding a bike, moulding clay to form a pitcher, the ability to tell a storm is coming from smelling the air.... this is tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is the sphere of artists and artisans, farmers and gardeners, athletes, dancers and singers... This is the knowledge that I'm acutely interested in.

 

On an afternoon in early December 2012 I walked to my creek, as I often do, collecting a handful of small things found along the way. These provided the content for my sams creek counting book - the humble, simple, everyday, bioregional (yet sometimes also global...), personal, small, known things of my creek-home...

Held in these simple items are innumerable personal stories, myths, histories: tacit and explicit knowledge of birds and creeks, wind and weather, insects and trees... representatives of the fundamental stuff of existence. This is the knowledge worth counting.

here it is - sams creek counting book

page by page...

 

its a simple, small, humble 

black and white book

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*Bemboka is a small town in my shire – for a brief moment in the 1980/90s a family operated a handmade paper mill there – the venture didn’t continue.... In 2011 I met the Australian distributor of Magnani Paper... imagine the mutual surprise when he told me how he used to manage a paper mill in a small NSW town and I told him where I was from and that I had a stash of that Bemboka paper... yes these small, often hidden histories and tales of connections drive much of my thinking about knowledge and place...

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