Sample Book Series III (a: Bearing witness; b: you can replenish yourself). Ink, natural dyes, beeswax on hanji, abaca paper & thread, and paper mulberry bark. 24.25 x 16 x 1.5” closed; dos-à-dos. One of a kind. Oberlin College Clarence Ward Art Library Special Collections.

This dos-à-dos is the third in a series of sample book artists’ books. Aimee wrote the text and printed it via inkjet. She performed all of the surface treatments for the handmade papers and fibers, which include different types of indigo. Gasali Adeyemo made the Yoruba indigo vats in Cleveland in June 2024, which impart a different blue from the pre-reduced vat that Aimee set up at the Kalamazoo Book Arts Center during an NEA-funded residency in October 2024. Each volume of this series explores a different technique by folding narrative into technical experiments; here, indigo’s relationship with hanji and related fibers.

This book is inspired by the scale and color of lace sample books in St. Gallen, Switzerland, created by Iklé Frères and Co. Chemical in the first three decades of the 20^th century. Aimee saw these books at the Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center’s Gallery in New York City in December 2022. Made at the close of a tumultuous year, this book also strives to create an expanse of calm, inspired by Agnes Martin drawings that Aimee first saw in the late 1990s at Oberlin College. As Helmut Becker noted about Martin, “Her work was influenced greatly by nature, however not in the sense of replicating nature – rather, she wanted the viewer to experience the same feelings they have when in front of nature.” Hopefully from this well of blue, we can rejuvenate ourselves for the challenges to come.

text from both books here