This past summer I traveled to Israel. While there, I saw the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. I was struck by their beauty and found them visually seductive. I was drawn to the shapes of the fragments, as well as the beauty of the decayed sheets of leather on which they were written. Since 1947 when the first scrolls were discovered by Bedouin shepherds, 15,000 fragments and 500 manuscripts have been found. I am most interested in the Thanksgiving Scrolls, the Second Isaiah Scroll and the War of the Sons of Light with the Sons of Darkness Scrolls. Although much has been discovered about the content of these three scrolls, there is still a great deal of mystery surrounding them: when exactly they were written, who originally hid them in the caves and what they reveal.

What intrigues me about the content of the scrolls is the fact that the text is both biblical and cultural. The manuscripts give us insight into behavior, military regulations, customs, political persecution and spiritual life.

The books and prints on exhibit now are Polyester Plate Lithograhs ("Pronto Plates") and images done on photopolymer printmaking plates ("Solar Plates").

Detail from Fragments: Short Story

Polyester Plate Lithography is a process by which an image is put on the polyester plate which has a surface very much like a metal lithography plate. The plate can be imaged by a laser printer, a copy machine or worked on directly by hand with materials that are insoluble in water. The plate is then printed like a lithograph, with oil based inks.

My passion for turning my prints into artist’s books continues... previous work dealt with the linear quality of music and has now morphed into the linear quality that the texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls present.