The Friends and the Minnesota Center for Book Arts are pleased to announce Wendy Fernstrum as the winner of the 2016 Minnesota Book Artist Award for her new piece, One Is the Holiest Number (#2), which was completed in 2015.
Her award-winning piece is a meditation on the paradox of one: how each of us as an individual is distinctly one, yet simultaneously part of a unified whole, as one. Fernstrum has investigated this theme for several years, creating work that explores the “in-between space” where identity is constantly shifting and certainties lose form. Work in the series has included monoprints, sculptural works, and installations. One is the Holiest Number (#2) is a traditional multi-signature codex incorporating relief, intaglio and letterpress printing. Text is minimal, allowing a variety of shapes, patterns, and textures to communicate content. Innovative page designs that hide and reveal imagery – a characteristic found in many of Fernstrum’s book works – prompt viewers/readers to slow their pace and provide opportunities for personal reflection. Quiet and unassuming, One is the Holiest Number (#2) isa wonderful combination of material form and narrative content.
Wendy Fernstrum has been making artist’s books for more than 20 years and writes, designs, prints, and binds her work under the press name of Fernwerks. In 2012, Wendy was artist-in-residence at the Women’s Studio Workshop, and in 2005 an artist-in-residence at Minnesota Center for Book Arts. She was the recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant in 2008, and she received a Jerome Foundation / Minnesota Center for Book Arts fellowship in 1996. Wendy earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota in 2003, and she resides in Marine on St. Croix, Minnesota. Her work is exhibited and collected nationally.
2016 Book Artist in the Library
View Wendy Fernstrum’s award-winning piece at George Latimer Central Library through the end of May, 2016!
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6eyO6CB6U8]