Linda L. Broadfoot ~ Florida

INSECTA
Text by A. S. Byatt
2005. Edition of 50.

9 x 13 x 2.5", 84 pages, half-bound portfolio enclosed in a custom-made maple and poplar insect specimen box. Images inserted in silk organza pockets mounted on the hand-bound pages of the six signatures. Line drawings by Sarah Crooks Flaire accompany the text. Endsheets and covers are handmade papers by Ann Marie Kennedy and Kathryn Clark. Contains thirty prints made from original hand worked 20x24" Polaroid image transfers produced at the Polaroid 20x24 Studio in New York.

A combination of handset letterpress and computer generated work. Letterpress was used to print the text using metal type on a flat bed press on a Vandercook Universal III using Hahnemuhle Biblio and Copperplate papers at the Letterpress & Foundry of Michael and Winifred Bixler. Then digitally reproduced small Giclée prints of the artist's original 20 x 24" Polaroid image transfers were printed archival on Crane's Museo paper using an Epson 4000 printer.

A modern day Cabinet of Wonders. Broadfoot uses A. S. Byatt's "Things Are Not What They Seem" to accompany her images as "a numinous guide to viewing" these wonders of nature. The insects shown were selected from the Florida State Collection of Arthropods.

Broadfoot: "In the spring of 2001, I began to borrow insect specimens from the Florida State Collection of Arthropods. Carefully transporting this delicate cargo to New York, I used the Polaroid 20 x 24 Studio to make large image transfers of my subjects. I was working with an alternative photography process—after the initial exposure, the image is transferred to watercolor paper, and then refined by hand to mute portions of its surface. The final piece is titled with the specimen's Latin name, in the tradition of ars botania. Selecting from more than 60 originals, I chose the work enclosed in this book to make small prints on fine art paper for these pages.

"Upon discovering in British author A.S. Byatt's Angels and Insects the mystic tale 'Things Are Not What They Seem,' I knew it was the ideal narrative frame for these strange and beautiful creatures. Her words are included here not only as a vital element but a numinous guide to viewing this Cabinet of Wonder. Such a tradition can be traced to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when European gentry compiled collections of oddities and exotic artifacts from the New World. These Wunderkammern were Cabinets of Curiosities to those who were bound to their parlors as the wonders of untamed lands flooded into their ports.

"Insecta is a modern-day Wunderkammer. Here, the reader may take an active part in the revelation of the cabinet's contents, a balance of the creations of both God and man—nature and art."
$5,000