River Man

2024

River Man is a recollection of true events that followed Hurricane Mathew in its path over Savannah, Georgia. The handmade edition forgives the man I found floating in the Vernon River.

Edition of 5
GD Department Archival Book Collection - Appalachian State University
7” X 5” X 0.6”
long stitch bound, glued into softcover with flexible spine

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River Man is an experience best perceived through touch and pace. Eerie moments in the story are intentionally positioned before green pages, where black ink images hide in plain sight until the reader is able to believe their eyes. Across five sewn signatures, four of these pages are backed with maps of the river. Embroidered lines rise and fall along the tidal charts, securing photos to the opposite side before theorizing the path the man took to find me.

Line breaks are structured to build intensities, which lead into visuals of the scene evoking silent pauses and a strange emptiness that feels wrong. Text describing how I remember the man’s shirt moving underwater remains sinked into a silk fabric page. The fragile material returns further in the work when the story unimaginably shifts, calling back the feeling of seeing life slip away for the first time.

One book required five hours of production. The embroidered river charts, two per copy, each cost an hour to punch and thread (a tedious design choice born from hyperfixating on the making of the first book).