Signs and Markers

When they take you on the tour of the library at Trinity College, where the famous Book of Kells is preserved and displayed, there is no photography allowed, to protect the images and calligraphy in the book. Only a few pages at a time are visible.

You peer through the protective glass covering and view the parchment vellum pages, decorated and illustrated so many ages ago, and try to imagine what life was like at that time using goose feather quills and having to make your own ink from oak gall.



This photo is two pages from my sketchbook for that trip. Because no photography was allowed I would sketch as quickly as I could while the guide conducted the tour, adding the color later from memory.



The little glass charms I've been making remind me of the images and antiquity of those books in the library in Dublin, and especially that book under glass. Especially the one with the word 'VISIONS' clipped from a shabby vintage book. The reverse side has a celtic knot pattern symbolising an animal from one of the texts.

I wanted them to look aged and old, as though they came from an ancient scholar's book satchel, carried on horseback through the isles and roadways of an older time.