Found and Bound- A Memory

“Found and Bound” took a lot of thought process before I was able to latch onto an idea or theme and honing the reason(s) for approaching this project in the way that I did. First, I was trying to interpret the given guidelines. They were a bit open ended and did not provide many limitations for what direction the project should be taken in other than the fifteen moves; actually, I removed and added so much to the project that I lost count after the fifteen. With so much freedom in the guidelines, I wanted to take the project’s title as literal as I possibly could and continue looking through the stack of books until I found something that caught my eye. None of the books I found had to necessarily correlate with one another, they just had to catch my attention. In fact, I got a little too much visual stimulation and ended up collecting more books than I ended up using. I simply wanted to keep my options as open as possible.

When it came time to actually come up with how I wanted to present my book as an object, I started searching for themes. I found that some of the books were meant to be a sincere gift for someone because of the notes that were in the front pages of the books. All I could think about was where these people were; why don’t they still have their books? Did the books ever hold any value or significance to the recipient?  Where did they come from, and how did they end up in southern Maryland? In asking myself these questions, I started to think about the journey that these books embarked on and the hands and eyes they went through. I realized that these books then served as memories; not only the memories of the initial givers and recipients, but everyone else who intercepted these books before I came across them.

With the idea of memory planted in my thought process for what to do for this project, I thought how those memories would only serve to the people who experienced them first hand, and of course, the book itself. But how could a book share all of its memories with everyone who comes across it? These memories then become one’s own, precious and private. The books carry much more than the story on the pages bound within the covers. It carries the thoughts, memories, and stories of everyone who has intercepted it whether they are significant memories or not.

I started to block out bits and pieces of each page and sequences of pages as I flipped through the books I used. It became, in a sense, my literal representation of what has happened to the memories that these books went through. Then, being bound together as one book, they can somewhat share those stories that are all coming from different directions. It is more so the mystery of the experiences that these books went through, and the new mysteries that A Memory will carry in the future.