Transformations I: 1973-74 (1977)

Transformations I: 1973-74 (1977)
Ellen Lanyon
Leporello with board covers. 174 x 115 mm. [24] pages. Acquired from Specific Object, February 2024.
© The Ellen Lanyon Estate, courtesy GRAY, Chicago/New York.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of artist’s estate.

Transformations is a book as drawing. Across 24 panels of this accordion-fold book, Ellen Lanyon develops a surreal graphical fantasia from a single image. Shading unifies the work across the folds and makes the sudden transformations of the figure seem more gradual than they are. The changes present themselves in motion, giving the metamorphoses an almost cinematic quality. The flower in the first panel attracts a bird in the second panel, and from the second to the third, the flower turns into a nest of eggs. Then, from the third to the fourth panel, as the eggs hatch, a snake reverses on itself to rear up and swallow the bird that first appeared in second panel.

And on it goes into a face, a mouthful of teeth, a manicure box, a doll’s face, a globe, a melon, a bird nesting in half of the melon, an egg in an egg cup, to the hatching of a frog from whose mouth the initial flower emerges.

Copyright panel, first panel, and last two panels.

Jan Voss’s Detour (1989) and Alessandro Baldanzi’s Chimere (2020) offer greatly extended examples of the conceit of elaborating a drawing or graphically connecting related images over the full length of a book. Michael Snow’s Cover to Cover (1975) advances a similar but more narrative conceit with photography as does Chinese Whispers (1975) by Helen Douglas and Telfer Stokes. The continuity of image from panel to panel or page to page draws the viewer through these different forms of codex. Yet the image’s transformations (whether by shading and line, or perspective, or montage) and their detailed interconnectedness slow the progress of hand and eye. In this, Lanyon’s Transformations I and these other works make the codex both vehicle and material of their art.

Further Reading

“Alessandro Baldanzi“. 24 June 2020. Books On Books Collection.

“Helen Douglas“. 24 February 2020. Books On Books Collection.

“Megan N.Liberty“. 17 February 2024. Books On Books Collection. Review of Liberty’s Craft & Conceptual Art : Reshaping the Legacy of Artists’ Books (2023), which comments on Transformations.

“Michael Snow“. 3 March 2021. Books On Books Collection.

“Jan Voss“. 25 June 2024. Books On Books Collection.

Beckett Sandra L. 2013. Crossover Picturebooks : A Genre for All Ages. London: Routledge. On the relation of picturebooks and artists’ books.

Drucker, Johanna. 2004. The Century of Artists’ Books [Second edition] ed. New York City: Granary Books. See page 205.

Sawin, Martica. 2011. “Ellen Lanyon“. The Brooklyn Rail, 3 February 2011.

Weyl, Christina. 2016. “Ellen Lanyon: The Objects of Her Obsession“. Art in Print, July-August 2016, Vol. 6, No. 2.