When We Were Birds

With poet Ginny Hoyle

Fixtures by Christopher Hecker

2011 Exhibition at Walker Fine Art, Denver, CO

Poems are poured into, around and through a grouping of sculptural book forms. This is book as icon, book as reliquary for the stories and songs that comprise our lives.

Collaged paintings and prints take you deep into the spirit and substance of the book forms, as if a 4-inch tourist were strolling through the pages. Luminous images celebrate details of the work—surfaces painted, drawn, inked, printed and overprinted. Poems rise from and melt back into the images. The collected poems are presented in books mounted on the back wall, an edition of 10 signed and numbered (hand-built) artist books with full color images from the installation, printed on archival watercolor paper and embedded in steel forms by Christopher Hecker, who also created tables for the sculpted volumes. Denver artist Efrain Cruz was the installation’s photographer.

When we were birds, the sky went on forever and the earth flew up to meet us in a haze of startled light. Then I was a child with wings, and the air a living thing as every flying child knows.

About The Books

The sculpted books are fragments of my work, rebuilt as sculptural codex volumes, binding experiences learning who I am. There is something freeing about tearing up things you have carefully preserved and making something altogether new from the pieces. The prints and paintings, and the bird books are wholly new, too, alive with light, and in many cases, vibrant color after years of a more somber palette.

Abandon (verb) 1. To leave someone behind. Perhaps a love you have outgrown and have grown strong enough, at last, to leave. How clear that seems in hindsight, how perilous at the time.

Abandon, vol 2, 2011

Sculptural table: 49 ½” x 30” x 30”, steel, Christopher Hecker
Codex: 25” high x 18 wide” x 10” deep (flat); folds out to 42”

One-of-a-kind sculptural book comprised of original paintings, drawings, mixed-media works, photographs, and poetry, cut, folded, and stitched onto linen tapes; hard covers with antique wood type.

Half Crazy, 2011

Sculptural Table: 53 ½” x 26” x 26”, steel, Christopher Hecker

Codex: English volumes: 11” high x 4.5” wide x 24” long; French volumes: 7” high x 5” wide x 28” long

Two book set; altered early 20th Century French Dictionnaire of Conversation, pertaining to the usage of women and young persons; and dictionaries: Webster’s New 20th Century Dictionary of the English Language (1942); Dictionaries (English and French); photographs taken in Rome.

Spellbound, volume 7

Sculptural table: 57 ½” x 27” x 26”, steel, Christopher Hecker

Codex: 4″ high x 6” wide x 9” long (closed/flat), 460 pages; opens to fan 16” length.

One-of-a-kind sculptural book comprised of photographs and poetry, cut, folded and stitched onto linen tapes; hard covers with antique wood type; photos were taken in Rome during three separate artist residencies (3 months each) and processed “provina colore.”