“All My Love” is a book filled with poetry that I have written over the years. It exists as a copy of how it lives in my brain. Only I can really understand it. Maybe some quotes are legible, but they get lost between the pages. You only know where it starts and not where it ends.
For this project, I started by transferring poetry onto large sheets of textured paper, which would later be folded into signatures. With the texture of the paper and the transfer, the words were not only backwards, but also distorted. Then I cut specific words and phrases out of blocks and printed them on the paper with gold ink. I folded the signatures, and took a bunch of different pull quotes. I embroidered these across the pages in several different colors. These colors were pulled from the cover paper. I bound the book together using Coptic stitching. I specifically chose this stitching method because it was the first non-adhesive bookbinding method I learned how to do, and it holds a special place in my heart. It comes together as a reflection of my brain in a way that doesn’t have to actually let everyone in. It doesn’t make me have to be vulnerable.