Beth Brandon

Beth Brandon is a Philadelphia-based artist who creates installations involving wallpaper, books, apparel, temporary enclosures, and other printed and textile-based matter. She has worked as an apprentice at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, and has shown her wallpaper designs in a variety of gallery and residential settings. Soon, her work will be on view at www.bethbrandon.com.

On my block, I plan for there to be
1) A library - The roof of the library opens into a book, which will
be a book of drawings of the squirrels who live in the roof of the
library. These squirrels, I expect, will make their way from the roof
into the walls and from the walls into the library, so that a person
taking a book off the shelf will find themselves face to face with one
of them, peering out of a hole in the wall behind the rows of books.
The entire library will be covered in bookcloth, and the roof will
look like an overturned book (like if you put a book you were reading
face-down on a table). The book/roof is hinged to the building (with
the bookcloth) - I attempted to illustrate how this will work through
the series of drawings attached to this email...

The illustrations in the book would be sparse, wordless drawings of
the lives the squirrels live in the roof of the library, as well as
pages of text that look like they have been gnawed away at
And I have attached some explanation of what happens when people borrow books...

2) Very skinny buildings (like we have in Philadelphia) which get so
skinny at one point that a building becomes nothing but a chimney. At
the base of this chimney is, of course, a fireplace - a community
fireplace. No sketches of this for you yet, but that is the idea. It
could be a kind of gathering place for the population of Opolis.

3) A Horticultural Society building - I guess this one has the least
developed story, so perhaps I should focus on the other two - but I
had a vision of this building that is a greenhouse, basically, made
out of mylar over a wooden or metal frame. The mylar I would print
(on the side that would be inside the building) with a floral pattern
- so it would kind of look like plants crawling up the walls of the
greenhouse, but would take the form of a decorative wallpaper-like,
indienne-style pattern.

so the only characters I have sketches of are the squirrels who live
in the roof of the library... I guess I'm working sort of backwards,
but I have clearer ideas at this point about the spaces that I want
characters to interact with, than the characters themselves. And my
ideas for stories/characters are coming out of that.

(second report:)

It has been my goal with these drawings to come up with a plan whereby I do not have an enormous, unwieldy book attached to the roof of the building. For this reason, I am definitely weighing in on the 1.5" = 1' scale, and my library will only be about 4.5' tall x 4.5' wide. I want short as well as tall people to be able to operate the library book.

To keep the library/book contraption adequately supported: - A wooden support in the base of the building - basically a square frame that is glued to the inside walls of the building at the base, and is screwed down (to the floor or whatever is directly under it). - Some sort of supports behind the building for the open book. These will either take the form of buttress-like supports coming out from the back of the building, or simply a row of buildings of a certain height behind the library building, whose roofs the book can rest upon when open. The book will only open so far as to stand straight up (my last set of sketches showed it opening further). That way, it isn't hanging down and putting a lot of stress on the rest of the building.

Since I don't know much about construction, wood-working, etc, or have the means to do it, I'm guessing I should talk to Jean about how best to do all of this. Hopefully I can work out some way of working with him even though I live in Philadelphia.

I've sent one sketch that shows how the windows of the library work - there will be little doors with tabs on them for people to open the windows and look in (at least on some of the windows). The tabs are just little loops of ribbon that will be glued underneath the layer of bookcloth that covers the building. Hopefully this makes sense from the drawing I'm sending.

More on narrative/characters:
In addition to animals living in the roof of the library, taking books and binding materials to build nests, and people borrowing books and being seen around the city under small book-tents... Through the windows of the library, people can be seen doing idiosyncratic things related to their relationships with books: a boy brings his sleeping bag to the library and naps in various secluded spots throughout the building; a man is obsessed with smelling all of the books and cataloguing his findings; the librarian and binder, covetous and precious about their books, are suspicious that either people are stealing them or the library is simply haunted (don't know about the squirrels/birds ...)

Later this week I can send sketches of these characters.

The fireplace nearby will serve as a gathering place for reading and storytelling, as fires often do. I need to consider my options as far as creatively depicting a fire without, actually, setting anything on fire.

Around the fireplace are exaggeratedly skinny houses, ranging from 5" to 1' wide, with some interior and exterior architectural features drawn onto their windows and facades.

The greenhouse buildling may be a bit much to take on in addition to all of this, but we'll see how the next week or so goes for me. I may scale it down to just a rooftop greenhouse attached to one of the houses on my block.