Embryo

From the Artist: This tiny, one-of-a-kind artist’s book was created Easter weekend during the quarantine lock-down using a real, free-range chicken egg shell and handmade, hand-dyed papers. The six leaves of the book are bound by a single stitch of thread to a small linen spine attached to the inside ‘end papers’ of the shell. The full text reads “Explore your inner space, store food, take nourishment, and gather strength for the world to come. And never stop creating.” Decorating Easter eggs is an activity I never grew out of, even after my kids did. This year I needed to level it up. After blowing out and cleaning the egg, I chipped slowly and carefully away at the shell to split it in two halves as neatly as possible. Fragile, challenging material for fragile, challenging times. And when the two halves came apart at last, albeit a little rough at the edges, it really did feel like some kind of breakthrough. Something had hatched—the creative process itself. A way to move forward while stuck in one place.