Melissa Oresky
Normal, IL
www.melissaoresky.com

Leaf Manual
2024
Five unique accordion books hand bound by the artist (volumes 1-5)
Collage, acrylic, paper pulp, graphite, and colored pencil, wax pastel on watercolor paper. Book board and book cloth binding. When closed, they are housed in a hand bound drop spine box.
Each book is 12.5″ x 8.5″ closed dimensions. The interiors are four or six double sided pages.

Artist Statement

My current work can be thought of as writing with plants. Leaf shapes, plant structures, and growth patterns become abstract communication and thinking systems, undergoing constant evolution and modification from work to work. I interpret a book’s form as both informational and biological; it is a hybrid plant and animal body with a spine and folios or leaves and written content that is cellular, grammatical, and plantlike. A book’s pervasive doubling and splitting addresses hands that hold, bodies that carry seeds of ideas and eyes that read and sprout.

Leaf Manual is a unique, multi-volume artist’s book that consists of five accordion books designed to be displayed freestanding and viewed from both sides. Within each volume, leaf and stem structures repeat through horizontal landscapes as inscriptions, and climb between lines and strata like a trellis. Color and form configurations are particular to each volume, following a thematic motif or visual story. How would a plant write about itself?

Now that these volumes are complete the next phase of the project will consist of an editioned reprint of the project that will be made from reproduced rubbings of each of the highly textural pages, overlaid by its translation. I have asked five authors (two poets, a lawyer, a historian, and a filmmaker) to collaborate by translating a volume into English and am expecting the translations to be completed over this summer.

I am a visual artist working between painting, works on paper, artist’s books, objects, and video. My recent work in artists books is deeply informed by my personal history working as book conservator in the 1990’s. As a library conservator, I learned to repair and create housings for circulating and rare books in languages such as Yiddish, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Latin, many of which I could sound but only partially understand. This partial understanding resonates with the way I encounter plants, and my conservation experience has informed my work as a visual artist. I have held onto an interest in written language, the various materials and materialities of books and information, and their preservation (or loss).