NOTES ON ALCHEMY
2018. Hand-bound artists' books with 410 pages.
Books occupy a strange space between the physical and the intangible. They are objects that store information, allowing us to access something that isn't physically present in the pages. In this series, volumes of 410 blank pages (referencing the books in Borges’ The Library of Babel, which contain all worldly information but are impossible to read) are bound and subjected to various alchemical processes, as described in The Compound of Alchymie (1471). Each book is transformed, becoming an artefact of its own making. No longer a vessel for information, now an embodiment of the knowledge that has shaped it. Unlike traditional alchemical texts, which often obscure meaning through allegory and coded language, these books express their subject matter directly. Stephen Hawking once described burning a book. "Information is not lost, if one keeps the smoke and the ashes. But it is difficult to read."
