As the show was just deinstalled from its display in UIowa Special Collections, we wanted to offer our congratulations to Leslie Smith for receiving the Handy Books exhibit purchase prize for her book "Inner Rooms." Also recognized with honorable mentions by our jurors were Maggie Heineman, Colleen Lawrence, and Lisa Miles. In her work "Inner Rooms," Smith combines the contemplative and the surprising, wherein the serenity of the individual mind at work—its grasp of and grasping after memory and place—opens itself to unexpected directions. "Gamete•Zygote•Embryo•Fetus•Neonate:" Synthesizing disparate sources and using the book format to imagine anew ideas about fetal existence, Heineman animates the entire piece with intelligent whimsy. In "Toward a Natural History of the Corallines," Colleen Lawrence worries the history and devolution of coral by overturning the book aesthetic of eighteenth-century print, employing white ink and hand lettering against translucent handmade paper mixing gray and indigo coloring. In “An Exploration of Friends; Taking into Consideration that I Love My Friends & I Don’t Eat My Friends; A Brief Internal Inquiry of the Pig: A Sentient Animal Which Possesses Mental Capabilities on Par With a Three-Year-Old Human Child,” Miles produces a homespun keepsake that is by turns edgy, sentimental, and funny, petitioning its audience through a witty use of crafty books that never loses it sharp critique. #bookarts #exhibition #awards #bookbinding #artistbooks #handbound #art #show #craft #uiowa #uicb #uispecialcollections #handybooks #cognition
