Book of Athena is an ongoing project that began in 2023 after spending several months in Greece. I purchased an old book titled “Athena” in Monastiraki, which speaks to both the goddess and the city of Athens. Printed in 1930 in Greece, its binding is in delicate shape. Many pages include text, illustrations, tables and graphs of data that become a graphic layer onto which my imagery is added. I’m using this book as a travelogue to record images in watercolor from my time spent in Greece, Romania, and Istanbul. This visual travelogue reflects on memory, ancestry and history, often layering qualitative and experiential imagery atop the quantitative printed page. It is inspired by the diaries, handmade/handwritten/hand-illustrated books, records of information and data, and history making/telling that have been part of human culture for thousands of years. I am interested in the remnants and fragments of the ancient past that have survived and their presence in our present, the record of qualitative versus quantitative information, and our ability to stitch together a narrative, not a whole narrative. I am curious about the missing pieces and our inability to know that history in its entirety.
The first four images are a series of larger 17 x 22 inch watercolor paintings (2025) created by printing scanned images of selected pages from the book onto watercolor paper. After printing I paint on top of the scanned image. All following images are painted directly in the book at 5 x 7 inches.
Kelsey Bosch 