Abridge

Ink and pencil on vellum palimpsests, bound with quilting thread into Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. 2008. 8” x 6” x 2”.

Language is anything but static, and makers of dictionaries often cut out words that no longer seem relevant or useful. Abridge is an altered dictionary into which now obsolete words have been reinserted, written on small rectangles of vellum, illustrated to look like illuminated manuscript palimpsests. In the infancy of books, before paper was available, palimpsests were pages from books handwritten on animal skin vellum which scribes scraped the ink off of in order to reuse them to write a new book. This makes a metaphorical parallel between the "scraping off" of information in the form of deleting it from dictionaries. The vellum pieces with words and their definitions hang precariously by threads into the binding of the book, somewhere between clinging on or falling out, their usefulness to our culture in question.