Conditions for Melting
One-of-a kind artist’s book, 2024. Acrylic, charcoal, gesso, graphite and ink on a single sheet of spiral-folded Okawara paper with letterpress and screen printing. Enclosed in a custom box collaged with cut paper. Closed dimensions are 19” wide x 11” tall x .8” deep. Fully open dimensions of the book are 72” wide x 36” tall, but the book can be also displayed at 36” x 10”
Printing text for Conditions for Melting by hand using wood type.
Conditions for Melting is an artist’s book made from a large mixed media drawing of an iceberg I photographed in the Antarctic peninsula. I cut and folded the drawing into a single sheet spiral book structure, then added letterpress-printed words to the reverse side where layers of turquoise ink have bled through in textured drips and splotches. Using a barren and spoon to pull impressions from wood type, I printed text identifying environmental and social pressures that provide perfect conditions for melting glacial ice. The text suggests that racism, tyranny and apathy are as much to blame for climate change as natural physical forces such as heat, pressure and time. A color palette of contrasting warm and cool colors point to the often oppositional relationship humans have with nature, while the tactile nature of the enclosure’s design and the long, crinkly pages of the book evoke personal memories of hiking through deep snow in Antarctica.
The book’s fragmented spiral-folded structure embodies the perception of climate change as a hyper-object, a complex set of systems and forces too vast for humans to comprehend or even see all at once. The colophon illustration offers a preview of the large scale ice drawing, which can only be seen at one time by completely unfolding the book. When folded, the book can be read in multiple directions—front to back, back to front and top to bottom— allowing the reader to create unique sequences of text and image.
Conditions For Melting, 2024, artist’s book by Rachel Simmons