Botanizing Hope is a workshop in which an altered book can become a personal archive of life in a changing climate. In this workshop, participants will learn basic techniques for altering a book to use as a journal in which to record observations of the natural world. We will begin by editing the content of a used book via cutting, pasting, gesso, and collage. Methods of creating pockets and cavities in the existing book structure will be demonstrated and discussed. We will also learn how to dry and mount botanical specimens. We will decode the scientific labeling methods used for such specimens as well as taking inspiration from early botanists who used more idiosyncratic methods. In this way, our altered books can become an archive of our personal experience of the changing climate. And our observations and creativity can become an antidote for despair.

About the Instructor

Lou Cabeen is a Seattle artist who works with a range of media including botanical specimens, textiles, stitching and collage, all of which inform her work in book arts. She uses cloth, paper and stitching in order to emphasize the tactile nature of private experience. Making altered books to use as journals and sketchbooks has been a private practice for many years, and a standard assignment in her University of Washington fiber and book arts classes. Her approach emphasizes the value of daily life and the empowerment that comes from taking the discarded ephemera of our lives and by giving it form, using it to create meaning