the book of water

For our first project in studio, we each choose one book from Peter Greenaway’s Prospero's Books to make a conceptual model of. I choose “The Book of Water.”

“This is a waterproof-covered book which has lost its colour by much contact with water. It is full of investigative drawings and exploratory text written on many different thicknesses of paper. There are drawings of every conceivable watery association - seas, tempests, rain, snow, clouds, lakes, waterfalls, streams, canals, water-mills, shipwrecks, floods and tears. As the pages are turned, the watery elements are often animated. There are rippling waves and slanting storms. Rivers and cataracts flow and bubble. Plans of hydraulic machinery and maps of weather-forecasting flicker with arrows, symbols and agitated diagrams. The drawings are all made by one hand. Perhaps this is a lost collection of drawings by da Vinci bound into a book by the King of France at Ambois and bought by the Milanese Dukes to give to Prospero as a wedding present.”

I choose this book,” because I found it intriguing, because water is pure. It is powerful and malleable taking every conceivable form. Water can destroy us but water is something that we cannot live without. When I began to think about how I wanted to produce this book, I was interested in the relationship that exist between water in a pure form and water is the form that society has degraded it to be. Plastic bottles. Millions are produced and used a day by society, thrown away without a second thought. It is how we consume water. The shortage of water is about to be the international community most pressing issue in the rapidly approaching future.






The first concept model on the left, that I explored creating was to completely encase the cover in plastic to represent the relationship between plastic bottles and water. The texture, light, and the effect that I found in the plastic was appealing, and it influenced the progress of my design. Another cover idea on the right was an attempt at seeing water though our eyes, and to physically trying to put water into the book.







I began to collect water bottle of all different shapes and sizes, and playing with cutting the plastic different ways, using the top the bottoms, and even the labels into my pages to represent the energy of water in all its forms.