Excerpt from Finding Home (2019) by Robert Bolick.

An explosion box, Turkish map fold, and small 3D-printed plastic house — the inventive combination reflects the many-featured domain of book art. That alone would warrant adding this work to the collection, but its union of material with content clinched the decision.

The work’s nomadic theme may have its roots in Levergneux’s various places of residence over time, but it also echoes her blog, entitled 1/2Measure Studio, which began at the end of 2015 with her moving from a 20×12-foot studio into one measuring 10×10. The blog records indefatigable travels and visits with fellow book artists at all points of the compass to which Finding Home‘s four flaps might also allude — just as the small model might also allude to the half-measure studio.

Among the Turkish fold maps, the small house also conveys centrality and both a point of departure and one of arrival. The spirals and concentric circles within the open maps emphasize further the theme of seeking a center. But the work is not only about place. With all the maps open, we have a house surrounded by four blooms of color, which implies a still point in time among the shifting seasonal imagery.

There’s much about this work that recalls Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1969). There is, of course, the miniature house itself, for which Bachelard has entire chapters, but also in the maps, there is the butterfly recalling the chrysalis (pp. 85-86); the sun-kissed foothills, the recurrent theme of the horizon, distance and immensity (passim); the red maple leaf, the autumnal recollections (p. 179); and the prairie snowscape, the paean to snow (p.61); and the longitudinal and latitudinal references, recalling this passage:

Each one of us, then, should speak of his roads, his crossroads, his roadside benches; each one of us should make a surveyor’s map of his lost fields and meadows. Thoreau said that he had the map of his fields engraved in his soul. And Jean Wahl once wrote:

Le moutonnement des haies C’est en moi que je l’ai. Poème, p. 46 (The frothing of the hedges I keep deep inside me.)