One is about butterflies, and one is about a mouse.
But both books feature visually stunning images.
Obstruction Island photographer Dianne Kornberg has just released a new book, “India Tigers,” published by William, James & Co., that features black and white images of butterflies and moths from India that were preserved in folded, triangular paper wrappings. It also includes essays by Clint Willour, Curator of the Galveston Art Center, and by Kim Stafford, poet and Director of the Northwest Writing Institute.
Kornberg is speaking at Darvill’s Bookstore on Thursday, June 24 at 7 p.m. She will sign copies of “India Tigers” and talk about her photography. In addition, she will be presenting original prints of marine algae photographed during two residencies at the Whiteley Center at the Friday Harbor Laboratories, as well as some of her recent collaborative work with poets.
Molly Coxe, the author and illustrator of 10 previous children’s books (published by Random House and HarperCollins), is also publishing a new book. She and her husband Craig Canine, who have lived on Orcas for three years, recently formed a publishing company, BraveMouse Books, and are set to release their first book, “Benjamin and Bumper to the Rescue.”
Coxe is presenting “Make-a-Mouse Open House” on June 26 from 4 to 6 p.m. at Darvill’s. She will teach how to make mice out of tiny baby socks and fabric. The official publication date is Aug. 1, so this is an early opportunity to buy copies and hear her read.
About the authors
Dianne Kornberg
Kornberg is an artist known for her work with biological specimens and large-scale black and white gelatin silver prints. Although she was trained as a painter, for the past 25 years her medium has been photography, often depicting laboratory specimens like horse and cat fetuses and the bones of crocodiles and pelicans.
“I started with bones and worked right through to the stuff in glass jars,” she said. “I grew up in a scientific family and I studied science in college, so I think a lot of that carries over into my interests. I think I’m in a still life tradition – I don’t really photograph living nature. I find these (laboratory images) really moving. They speak to something that is pretty primal in ourselves. Bones are very beautiful.”
Kornberg was raised in Richland, Wash. She received her BFA from the University of Washington and her MFA from Indiana University. She is a Professor Emerita at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Ore. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally in more than 25 solo shows.
“India Tigers” was inspired by a series she completed in 1994 of dried insects from the mid-20th century. After running into a former biology teacher who handed her a cigar box full of the specimens, she decided to photograph the butterflies, moths, and dragonflies.
“What was so interesting was the paper they had been saved in: old school work, envelopes, bills of sale,” she said.
In 2008, the publisher of her first book contacted Kornberg about the insect series, hoping to produce an entire tome of them. For “India Tigers” she used some of her original images as well as a handful of new ones. She photographed the butterflies so that “the wrappings appear to extend out from the picture plane, as might the wing of the insect. All of the images in the series rotate on an axis around a shared, central point, and a delicate sense of movement is suggested as the direction of the light changes from one piece to the next.”
Molly Coxe
Coxe grew up in Atlanta, Ga., and ever since she can remember, she loved to draw whimsical characters and make things with bits of paper or fabric. She spent hours creating clothes and furnishings for a motley assortment of stuffed mice, and in the second grade she wrote a play about a giraffe who wanted to leave the zoo to have adventures, and her class produced the play.
After graduating with honors from Princeton with a bachelor’s degree in English, Coxe attended graduate school at Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of the Arts) for two years. Her children’s books have been selected for the Children’s Book of the Month Club, featured in a Scott Foresman Addison Wesley reading-program textbook, and won an International Reading Association “Children’s Choice” award.
“I like to write and illustrate for children because I love the way young children think, and I like to try to access this part of my own mind,” Coxe said. “Children don’t create sharp boundaries between ‘real’ and imaginary. There’s a flexiblility, a fearlessness, a playfulness.”
After her two children had both left home for college, Coxe decided to try a new creative direction.
“I wanted to find a way to reach beyond the limitations of my drawing style to create more visually rich, textured images,” she says. “Also, I wanted to tell a slightly more complicated story than the easy-reader formula, with only a few words on each page, would allow.”
Coxe began making three-dimensional creatures out of wire, wool, a needle and thread, and bits of old fabric. Once again, she was drawn towards mice. As she constructed the mouse characters, they started taking on personalities that suggested stories, other characters, and settings.
The result of two years of tinkering and refining is “Benjamin and Bumper to the Rescue,” her latest book, the first published by Coxe and her husband’s new company, BraveMouse Books.
“My new book creates a richly-detailed imaginary world that I would like to hang out in myself,” said. “It’s visually beautiful – full of old fabrics, ancient building materials, and a warm light that southern France, where the photos were taken, is famous for. The heroes, Benjamin Middlemouse and his buddy, Bumper the elephant, are endearing characters that I think everyone can relate to.”
To promote the book, Coxe and Canine are making a short “trailer,” featuring the narration of local storyteller, Antoinette Botsford, and a sound track composed by local musician Steve Alboucq.
The next BraveMouse Books title, “Posie and the Pirates,” is scheduled to come out in the fall of 2012.
