Interpretation

Carving text

7 Voids

Carving by Puncturing

After looking at the The House of Seven Gables, I decided to focus on the concept of the house and its gables and the themes of sin and reconciliation.

Reconciliation:

The story begins with one family, the Pyncheon family, coveting the land of another family, the Maule family, and building a house on that land. At the end of the story the initial sin is resolved through a reconciling of wrong doings committed between the two families. Similarly, like the story it contains, the book itself can be perceived as a reconciled and complete piece. The book has two covers, complete chapters, and text centered on the page. The first concept I had of redesigning how the book will be perceived was to unresolve the reconciliation of the book. Through thinking of the text as the solid and the page as the void, my idea was to remove text from the page without physically carving, carving without carving. By removing the ink to reveal the white page the balance between text and page and solid and void can begin to become disrupted.

House and Gables:
Central to the story is the house where the characters live.  The house in the book was inspired by the original House of Seven Gables located in Salem Mass. The original house was at one point owned by Nathaniel Hawthorne's cousin.

The second approach to carving, 7 voids, takes the idea of the gables of the house and reinterprets them through carving seven voided sections into the pages of the book. There is an ambiguity of what is considered the gable. Is it the solid page or the void?

Sin:
The story and actions of the characters center around an initial sin that is committed by one family on another. Sin is in essence a violation. The third approach views the act of carving the book as a violation of the book. The idea of puncturing thus reflects a sin committed against the book.