Turkish Secrets: A Creative/Critical response

When approaching the concept of an accordion book, I went further and decided to make a book consisting of Turkish folds. In a previous blog post I spoke about how I was wary of making my book too busy, too much for a viewer to realize. The numerous folds and various directions presented by the layout of the pages can sometimes take away from the content of the book. While it may not precisely look like a traditional “book”, my creation absolutely is. It has a form of binding and it has pages, although they are small. The concept of my book originated from the ideology of a zine, but mainly the portion about how it can be circulated easily and transported easily. That being my intent, my Turkish fold book is 4 inches square and about a centimeter tall. It has a slender, black, fabric cover and a relatively sleek, white profile. My intent behind all these details was to create a discreet and unassuming book which didn’t elude much of what it contained.

I’ve played with different types of covers in the past and since I was going more untraditional for this project, I kept rolling with that idea. This means I used a different paper than I typically would have. I used bristol board for my pages and glued the sections together using pH balanced glue. For my cover I used two layers of watercolor paper I also glued together, and then wrapped as usual with black book cover fabric. I think this reflects what was available to me, in my academic setting, because while we have a plethora of materials available in our classroom, I’ve played with a lot of them before….but I decided to go on a scavenger hunt and find materials so similar yet different that that of what was provided. On page 62 of The Book by Amaranth Borsuk, Borsuk says the book is a mere vessel for the information it contains, and that is exactly what my book is. When you open my book, the pages can be a bit overwhelming, but I believe that is a part of my book. Instead of me avoiding chaos or trying to reduce it as much as possible, I just went with it.

The content on these pages are the lyrics from a song which is important to me. While it may be cheesy to say, this song is extremely important to me. It has to do with betrayal and unfaithfulness and the struggle of living everyday life as the “bigger person” even though you really don’t want to be nice. We’ve all been that person, it doesn’t matter who you are, even if it hasn’t happened since you were a kid, maybe you were forced, but you were the bigger person. This song is about that, all of that. While I do anticipate my audience to be mostly artists, I don’t have a strict outline for what an “artist” is. Just because you’re a science major who dabbles in writing poetry doesn’t disqualify you from being an artist. And vice versa, just because you’re a fantastic painter or whatnot doesn’t mean you have the true mind of an artist….so truth be told, this book could work for any audience. That being said. I still think a younger audience would better enjoy this book. Why? Because of the excessive swearing! Not just that, but the sexual innuendos and the language used, it just is aimed at a younger audience.

A photo displaying the general folded direction of the pages.

The reason I embraced the chaos of this book with the splattered paint and the words scrambled around the pages is because that’s how I feel when I listen to that song. Not only is that how I feel when I listen to that song, but that’s how I felt when I experienced everything this song discusses. One important thing I wish to express is that I did not write this song. I give explicit credit to everyone involved in the writing of the book on the last page.