Sarah Bryant, Juror
Hove, United Kingdom

Sarah Bryant, who operates under the name Big Jump Press, designs and produces letterpress-printed artists' books in editions ranging in size from ten to one hundred copies. Her work can be found in dozens of collections including The Yale Arts Library, The Houghton Library at Harvard University, The New York Public Library and The Darling Biomedical Library at UCLA. Sarah received her MFA from the University of Alabama MFA in the Book Arts Program in 2008. She currently lives and teaches in the UK.

Website: bigjumppress.com

Biography

Biography is an examination of the chemical elements in the human body and the roles they play elsewhere in the world. This book grew out of my desire to use the periodic table, our visual method of categorizing every particle of matter in the universe, as a tool for creating a portrait of a human being, the viewer of the book. We are composed of a finite number of elements, each of which has a rich life outside of our bodies making up critical components of the physical world and the tools that we produce and use to measure and investigate that world. Each chemical element present in the human body is identified early in the book as a rectangle of specific color. Spreads in the book present diagrams describing these elements as they exist in the periodic table, the earth's crust, seawater, and a selection of man-made weapons, medicines and tools. The colored rectangles are present throughout the diagrams in the book, which are sometimes difficult to decode and are increasingly interrupted by blind stamped organic shapes and pressure printing.
Letterpress printed from polymer plates on Zerkall Book paper.
8.75 x 5.5 x .75 inches; 22 x 14 x 2 centimeters. Created 2010.