THESE ROOTS GO DEEPER THAN THE BIRTH'S SURFACE-- A FAMILY TREE BOOK (2002)

This book is my attempt to show others how my family is put together, you see...I have seven brothers and sisters but I'm an only child.  I have step-siblings, half-siblings, step-parents, biological parents and there I am in the middle of all of it. I'm the only child between my biological mother and father but they each had children from other relationships and marriages who ended up being my siblings.  I call it a nuclear-family reaction.  This book tells the story of how it all happened and contains photos and memories of each person in my family.

The book itself is a case-bound codex style stitched book with the supporting signatures folding out into four large accordion pages.  Each of the large accordions has several smaller accordions attached to show the "branches" where children were born from each couple's relationship. Because of this design, it's impossible to see the whole book at once, as parts of each story must fold up to show the others. This aspect of the design was intentional to demonstrate what it's like to live in a family like this.  I can never see all my family members at once as they are all part of different families and most are not related to each other at all. I connect all these families together. As the text from the book states:

"I am scaling the center line, this middle link that holds two families together with a love far stronger than what has never held my parents together."

Each block of text and each part of the tree and root images were all done by hand one at a time using photocopy transfers with Citre-Strip paint stripper and a burnisher.  All the photos were printed with 80-year archival ink on an Epson photo printer.  The papers used are handmade, hand-dyed Lokta papers from Nepal and all the pages and accordions were hand cut.

This book was originally made as an edition of ten. Five of the books were completed and were gifted to the different households in my family so everyone can have one to look through to see how they are connected to all these other people through me.  The other five books were almost completed when they were unfortunately destroyed in a fire in 2003.