Self Dual: How to Walk a 30,000 mile Tightrope

Starkville, Mississippi:: Crooked Letter Press,, 2005.. Edition of 50, standard copy. 4 x 6"; 40 pages. Two small books in one bound with a dos-a-dos style case binding covered in dyed Mingei paper and Iris bookcloth. Printed on cotton paper handmade from Knudson clothes. The text is handset in Lutetia metal types case by Harold Berliner. The illustrations are inspired by the landscape along the route between Starkville, Mississippi, and Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and are rendered using linoleum reduction and line drawings printed from photopolymer plates. Housed in a paper letterfold case. During the three years while she was earning her MFA in Book Arts from the University of Alabama, Ellen Knudson each week left her young son and husband (who teaches at Mississippi State University) in Starkville and drove the 80+ miles on US 82 to Tuscaloosa – and each week she retraced her route, returning home to spend time with her family. The trip – her passage between her dual existences during this time, is here documented with expressive typography and images. Ellen Knudson: "Dual is a mathematical term that means, if you have a geometric object such as a cube, you can draw another object inside it by joining the midpoints of the faces. The object is self-dual when the new interior object looks like the original, only rotated and smaller. Self dual suited the status of my life. The book is a collection of driving thoughts that occurred during the 30,000 milles I drove between Starkville and Tuscaloosa from 03 to 05.