New England Book Artists are excited to present our Featured Artist Member for April 2021: Alice Stanne, a Boston-based handmade book artist and illustrator. She combines her watercolor and cut paper illustrations with various bookbinding techniques to create one of a kind artist books, rich with detail and pattern. Working mostly on a small scale, her style and concepts add touches of humor and whimsy to themes of nature, fantasy, and architecture, often inspired by research into history, culture, and folklore. Alice’s work showcases her attention to craft and design, always featuring artwork that has been handcrafted by the artist herself.
Alice studied Illustration at Massachusetts College of Art & Design, where she learned to hone her drawing and conceptualizing skills to support her love of visual storytelling. It wasn’t until taking the department’s Book Arts course, that book making truly claimed her soul. Even after more than a decade, the ability to combine visual storytelling with tactile objects makes books Alice’s preferred medium.
Now Alice passes her love of books forward, teaching book arts classes to people of all ages. In particular, she enjoys teaching at her alma mater, for both the undergraduate and continuing education programs.
The Wind in the Willows – Mr. Mole
Tunnel Book with Watercolor Illustrations
9 x 9 x 3 ”
As a student, and now as an instructor, I’ve found that tunnel books are a good gateway to book arts for many visual artists accustomed to working two dimensionally. As a format, it’s a great bridge between image making and the benefits of a book structure. It allows you to explore depth, dimension, and lighting to maximize the three dimensional picture plane for telling stories and using depth to convey space and time.
For Health & Beauty
Cut Paper Illustration mounted in Handmade Box
6 x 8.5 ” (closed)
Held in private collection
A large amount of my work is based on historical research, and I am particularly drawn to the overlap of wellness trends and medicine throughout history. One of the beauties of working with cut paper is the ability to provide information on many layers and explore the interplay of those elements when they are stacked together. With this piece, I designed a top layer inspired by Victorian wellness advertisements. This layers over the anatomical interior, showing the effect on the organs and women’s health. To finalize the idea, the box closes with a tape measure, made from Tyvek and held in place with Velcro.
Corseting has become a stereotype of “evil fashion”. However, when it first gained popularity in the 1800′s, it was initially promoted as a wellness trend, providing support to the spine and core muscles and preventing overexertion. The slimmed waist was simply an added bonus. Eventually, the slimming technique was taken to the extreme, and a fixation with tiny waists took hold. Depending on the regiment and tightness, women could develop severe hunger and shortness of breath, as organs were squeezed and restricted. Muscles and bones could be irrevocably altered, especially if corseting started at a young age.
Haunted House Series
Watercolor Illustrations in a Series of Handmade Accordion Books
Individual Books vary from 1 – 5” on a side
Entire house measures 9.5 x 5”
This series was created for the Month of Fear (www.monthoffearart.com) challenge, which provides spooky weekly prompts for the month of October, using a single word. Driven by a desire to create a complete series and a love of dollhouse-style cutaways, the haunted house features a total of five books, each for one room of the house.
‘Above’ were the ghosts in the attic. ‘Below’ were zombies in the basement. ‘Within’ was a haunted portrait gallery. ‘Without’ was an untamed conservatory. And ‘Unseen’ was the main hall of the house itself.
I tend to utilize accordion-style structures for many of my structures. Given my focus on complex illustrations and pop up elements, accordion books are the easiest to manipulate, both for image making and construction.
Cliché Case Studies
Gouache Illustrations and Printed Matter in a Pamphlet-stitched Softcase Book
4 x 4” (closed), 4 x 8” (open)
This pair of books came from the idea of color blindness and how it might prevent characters in a genre film from missing the clichéd red flags around them. Inspired by the Ishihara color perception test, each image shows a representation of a different cliché. The Red Flag Test focuses on tropes from horror movies, and the Red Rose Test are those from romances.
Depending on how many of the clichés the participant can identify, this will determine the likelihood of their ability to survive (in a horror movie) or find love (in a romance). The participant can then be ranked on a scale of character tropes to determine their role. The most astute will reach the end destination of their film, achieving “Final Girl” status or “Soul Mate.” The less discerning might end up as the “Quirky Best Friend” or the “Sex Object.”
Bound together into handmade manila folders with paper-clipped inserts and handwritten notes makes them feel as though they have been plucked from a pop culture lab.
Love Thy Neighbor
Accordion Book with Watercolor Illustrations in Handmade Box
4 x 3 x 1”
Celebrating cultures around the world, Love Thy Neighbor reflects the unique and situational building and living practices of people around the world. Despite differences in customs, wealth, materials, wants and needs, we are all neighbors in a global world.