The Cover Story
The Cover Story: Etching Series
This suite of etchings forms the origin point and conceptual bedrock of The Cover Story. Each print is based on the cover of a carefully selected book—spanning topics such as art, history, migration, personal development, literature, and language. These are not arbitrary choices, but a curated collection that maps the influences, questions, and tensions at the core of my own artistic journey and inquiry into how knowledge is formed and held.
Etching as a process—slow, deliberate, and tactile—invites a kind of reverence for the materiality of the book, while also allowing for transformation and intervention. Through etching, I reimagine these covers, sometimes blurring, eroding, or distorting the familiar images and texts. The resulting prints retain the marks of their making: subtle textures, surface irregularities, and traces of labor that echo the experience of reading and remembering.
Together, these works act as both homage and critique. They draw attention to the enduring authority of books as objects of knowledge, but also question that authority—highlighting how books can both shape and limit the way we see the world. The inclusion of worn edges, faded text, or disrupted compositions suggests the impermanence and fragility of knowledge, memory, and even cultural canon.
As individual works and as a collective archive, these etchings invite viewers to pause and reconsider their own relationships with books, knowledge, and history. They serve as both prototypes and provocations, offering a visual and conceptual foundation for the expanded installation, and opening a dialogue about what it means to “cover,” preserve, or rewrite the stories we inherit.
