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.