My book for Gail Hoffman's 2-d class is called "Is
it a question of time?". It is a series of unanswerable ( I think ) questions
I had about time. The structure is an accordian with alternating colors
of paper to symbolize the cycle of day and night which was used to tell
time in the beginning. The cover is crinkled gold wrapping paper with
dried leaves in the shape of a question mark. When I originally made
the book, the first couple of leaves were alive, and then I used in between
leaves that changed to dead leaves at the end of the question mark to
show the effect of time, but I think they are all dead by now. The words
and illustrations in my book are stamps and collage because that is what I
enjoyed doing most last semester.The only non-question in my book can be
found on the last page (time is everything). I think it is an answer to
the title of the book, but it also raises another question which ends the
book (why?).
This book was inspired by my interest in the different Special Forces
units in our military, particularly in the airborne divisions. Jumping out
of an airplane is something I've always wanted to do, so I decided to write a
poem about the experience and what it might be like. The poem was successful,
so I decided to base this book on the same theme. Both the poem and book are
based on a particular type of jump, called a H.A.L.O., which stands for High-
Altitude, Low-Opening. It is used by Special Forces troops that want to enter
an area undetected. The team jumps from thirty thousand feet so that the
delivery aircraft itself can't be seen or heard by anyone on the ground. The
risky part about this type of jump is that the team doesn't open their
parachutes until they're only two thousand feet above the ground. I took this
risk into consideration and decided to write about the consequences of one's
chute not opening as planned and what goes through one's mind when something
like this happens.
The book materials include black matte board, Indian hand-made paper,
actual parachute cord for the book binding, transparent sheets of various
colors, and black and white photocopies for the main images. For the
text, I ran the pieces of hand-made paper through a laser printer after
laying everything out on my computer.
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