About the Book:

Hidden Deep uses the image and mythology of the labyrinth to explore entrapment and release through two stories: one mythic and broadly known, one deeply personal.  Created as a four-fold book structure, the book allows the reader to enter into the labyrinth while simultaneously deconstructing the form and discovering the second narrative.

I created this piece for a book arts class assignment to use the metaphor of a labyrinth, and I sought an alternative structure that would allow the story to unfold (literally).  It was a fun puzzle to design the layers so that only segments of the imagery would be revealed with any given page, and so that the labyrinth itself was segmented onto layers, whole only when the book was fully closed.

About the Text:

The myth text is based on the story of the Minotaur from a translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  My re-writing of the story was abbreviated due to the limited space to place the text as the book unfolds.  The companion text is also terse so that the reader can grasp what they have found but still follow the thread and escape the labyrinth.

About the Materials and Processes: 

The imagery for the book is two-fold, consisting of colored pencil drawings and the stitched parts of a labyrinth outline.  The colored pencil drawings were scanned and printed onto transparencies along with the accompanying text; these were then layered with tea-dyed drawing paper with hand-cut windows.  The layers were machine-stitched together with the muslin edges; hand-embroidered stitches outline sections of the labyrinth and the path out.  The fonts used are Papyrus and Helvetica; the text was digitally typeset, then laser printed and transferred to the fabric using a xylene solvent/direct color laser printed onto the transparencies along with the imagery.