“Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure.”
Albert Camus, The Stranger.

My Private Journal Entry from 21 AUG 2018:
I live in suspended time. The time when you know you are moving but you cannot move, know you are breathing but there is no air, and you come to grips with the reality that everything is going to change. This is the place between belief and disbelief.

A Brief Story of the Loss:
The project officially launched in August 2018 with overwhelming, wonderful, and humbling success. Over the course of 20 days I met with 18 project participants. By the end of the 20th day, I had been already contacted about bringing the books to additional locations in California, The East Coast of the US, and Europe. On the 21st day the case the books traveled in and the books were stolen from a car while parked during transport in San Mateo, California. The travel case was found, the thief was caught and ultimately jailed, but the books were gone and were never recovered. My mother had died again. And again a piece of me died as well.

The below statements and images are all that is left of the project.

The Cookbook Project

Creating connection with recipes and stories…

Click on images below to learn about the story of each book, material details, number of pages, first recipe, participants, production images, and its inspiration.

Project Statement

The work uses the frame of the kitchen as a place where shared experiences both good and bad occur. I aim to expose histories of joy and pain, and in the process, create a collection of stories, both universal and personal, with recipes. The content is a collaborative venture leaning on the history of mail-art and family-built recipe books. I have found the histories of bookmaking and sculpture to be useful in arranging ideas in order to align content, concept, and form. In this project, I hope to make visible the typical verbal histories of how we all take our meals and manage relationships. The project is grounded in my history of discovered family mistruths, personal love being in the kitchen, and storytelling.

Project Structure

The Cookbook Project, a series of handmade artist books, each designed to encourage personal introspection and at the same time create connection to a community. For me, they solidify the now, memorialize the past, and set the table for the future. Each volume opens with one of my recipes and my story of the memory. I then personally bring the books to project participants who in turn experience them in person and choose a volume to their story and recipe to. I ask that each recipe added include one ingredient from the preceding recipe if possible. I facilitate the continuation of each book's journey. Circulation began in August 2018.