Artwork > Shelf Life

Shelf-life is an ongoing project consisting of a series of scanned images taken from coffee/tea/wine/coke stains smeared on the inside fold of library books. I am intrigued by the fact that these stains are residuals from a brief moment or accident in the life of the library borrower and they likely occurred while the user was engaged in a form of learning. While the book is a copy belonging to a public establishment, the accidents somehow personalize the pages.

The stains became recorded/filed/archived within the same system that conserves and protects histories of ideas.

I alter the scans to include the mirrored image and thus doubling on the stain to create a Rorschach-like image. I am not necessarily interested in the psychological evaluation that inkblot tests present, but the apperception we may bring to the work when viewing - the connection of one type of information to another. In Shelf-life, I am interested in the connections between moments, how we process those moments, recordings of those moments, and how we process those recordings.

scanned stains found in library books
Uncommon Cultures
(from the series Shelf Life)
scan, altered image of a stain in a library book
digital image
2007