LIMEN

Can a book about thresholds become a threshold itself? LIMEN began in Pompeii, September 2024, inside the Villa of the Mysteries. In Room 5, a continuous red mural frieze unfolds with near life-size figures, an image long linked to Dionysiac initiation. The fresco has also been read through symbolic and Jungian frameworks as a drama of the psyche. LIMEN is conceived in tension with those readings. My gaze moves along a Platonic axis: choice, necessity, and the daemon's bond with the soul. The work is built as a threshold experience: silence, near illegibility, sparse utterance: where light decides what can be read. Materials serve the book's architecture. Vellum behaves as membrane, as veil; flax holds light as tremor. Reading becomes physical: breath aligning with the turning of folios, visibility arriving and withdrawing. At the book's axis lies a single continuous line-drawing: the dark-winged figure, not illustration but witness, the daemon's presence held in one unbroken stroke. An incision in flax. The book closes in suspension: a breath held between rupture and rapture.

Essay →

specifications

Text fragments and threshold folios screen printed in white ink on bespoke Belgian flax; colophon letterpress printed from polymer plates; limp vellum binding on tapes; custom plexiglass enclosure.

• Edition Size: 13 + 2 artist proofs

• Number of leaves: 56 (28 folios)

• Dimensions: 21 × 35 cm (closed), 42 × 35 cm (open)

• Paper: Bespoke Belgian flax (45 gsm), handmade by Gangolf Ulbricht, Berlin, Germany

• Screen printing: Thomas Wojak (The W.O.R.K.S), California

• Colophon: Letterpress printed by Lisa Rappoport, California

• Binding: Limp vellum on tapes by Lisa Van Pelt, California

• Covers: Limp translucent goat vellum, William Cowley, UK

• Line drawing: Kostas Iraklis Georgiou, Athens, Greece

• In dialogue with: Nor Hall (archetypal psychologist), Minneapolis

• Date: early winter 2026

the process

In LIMEN, materiality is not in service of the concept but a form of it: each choice of material and process is an attempt to enact threshold, not illustrate it. The text is screen printed in white ink on bespoke Belgian flax, handmade by Gangolf Ulbricht. White on white was the point: legibility shifts with the angle of light, so the words arrive and withdraw as a folio turns. Reading becomes an act of following light rather than simply looking at a fixed surface. The vellum cover carries the title reversed on its underside, visible only through the translucent skin of the material, a nod to medieval illuminators who sheltered sacred words within skin. The colophon, letterpress printed, gives the reader a kind of map rather than an explanation, prompting a second, closer viewing rather than resolving what the folios withhold.