What is an altered book? An altered book is an art in which artists recycle or transform exiting books into new works of art. It is realism without being real.
The book becomes a canvas for new ideas and images. Pages can be removed, added, embellished, or incorporated into a new representation of the written word. Or the pages can be treated like a blank canvas and reworked into something entirely new.

My altered book is titled 'Soul Cry'. It was conceived when I became pregnant with my son, as a future gift for him. I want him to know the truth of who I am - not the face I put forward as 'mother'. I wanted the book to be honest about my voyage through the madness and insanity of active, rapid-cycling bipolar. I wanted it to both reflect the pain and the lessons I have learned. I also wanted the book to reflect the beauty that is in all things, even mental illness. It is an ongoing project. When it is full, I will move on to Volume 2, then Volume 3, etc.

There is no right or wrong way to do an altered book. You can treat it as a journal or as a major work of art the way Tom Phillips does in his "A Humument a Treated Victorian Novel". Mine is a treated as a story. Some pages were born from pre-conceived themes. Some just unfolded, similar to the way a Point Zero painting will. Like with the Point Zero technique, the creation of each page is therapeutic. I give voice to a memory or a lesson learned and it is released. Collage has always been therapeutic for me, as an art form, because doing collage relieves the pressure of following a 'technique' and/or doing it 'right or wrong'.

The artwork itself is a combination of found papers, my own paintings, photography and ephemera that has personal meaning. Each page incorporates a complete alteration of a found image, as it was painted over or into it; giving the image added depth and personal meaning.

Unfortunately, the photographs do not accurately reflect the power of what an altered book is. It's more than the alteration of existing pages. It takes a two-dimensional medium and turns it into three dimensions. When you look at this book, each page interacts with the page preceding and following it. I cut a window in sections that opens to the page following the one you are viewing. My goal was to show how each life lesson interacts or grows from the one before or after it.

The emphasis is to have the impulse of what I want to be known, jump out at you. Thus, the eyes on one page, use false eyelashes...when you see the book in person, those eyes seem to be really looking at you. Ephemera is consistently used to actively involve the viewer in the image. For example, "Never a Bride" features a vellum envelope holding a pre-engagement ring I once proudly wore back when I was a child of 18 years. I show a self-portrait me, looking through a window at the Bride I never am.

Never a Bride
What if God was a Woman?
Rage Lies - See Through It
BiPolar Shatters
	Honor The Feminine
Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder