Jill Marie Holslin

Report of Explorations across the Lands of the Shoshone Nation in the year 1843 by Abigail Martin by authority of the Eva Scott Fényes Institute, 2021

Artist book, Rives BFK printmaking paper, watercolor, india ink, organic materials.

6 x 8 inches

Using the conceptual strategy of critical fabulation, this artist book is an appropriation and revision of the expedition and report of John C. Frémont, 1842-44. I invented a nineteenth-century female explorer and created the piece as her handwritten logbook, using a single page folded book form. The reading of the single page folded book involves the viewer in a haptic experience with the physical object. Its form reproduces the process of geographical exploration; it is non-linear and when opened up, the pages turn sideways and upside down, embodying the processes of getting lost and finding your way. I experimented with watercolor, india ink, gesso and acrylic medium to add hand drawn maps and plant specimens, lines of poetry, Shoshone language words and organic elements into the pages of the book. My aim was to both replicate and trouble the colonial processes of geographical exploration, information gathering, classification, and organization that shape the conventional nineteenth-century government report.