Cicadoidea: Cicada Explorations

Title: Cicadoidea: Cicada Explorations
Year Created: 2026
Dimensions: Box and Drawer (L 7” x W 5” x T 2.5” ) Book (4.5" x 5.5" closed)
2 sections, 16 pages 
Edition of 15

Materials and Media: waxed canvas cover, letterpress printed double pamphlet booklet, handwritten specimen findings, miniature orgiami, paste papers, handmade papers

Description of the book form:
This sculptural artist book and box integrate a framed collage of specimens with a bound artist book, creating a three-dimensional environment that unfolds as a visual narrative. The cover features a letterpress impression printed into waxed linen fabric and sewn in a limp paper style binding. The book is structured as a double pamphlet binding with a handmade paste paper support, and the interior combines letterpress printing with handwritten text.

Description of the artist book:
Originally conceived as sculptural studies of cicada forms, this edition expanded into a broader exploration of origami, storytelling, cicadas, and handmade paper. Developed through an ongoing collaborative process with my son, the works weave together imaginative documentation of both found and altered cicada forms. The book explores the intersections of collage, scientific observation, and folded illustration, bringing these elements together in a single, contemplative experience.

Excerpt from the book:
"My son and I share a fascination with cicadas and folded paper. Small gestures where meaning begins to fold inward. Hushed voices, busy hands, imagination, ideation—ways of paying attention. It requires many kinds of attention, practiced slowly, shaped by repetition and return. We use multiple senses, often close to the ground.

It began with the remnant exuvia—husks left behind. We peeled casings from tree bark and gathered others on walks through our neighborhood, their backs split open and perfectly intact. We lined them up—some purchased and some found—unfamiliar colors and markings, from places we had never been. We compared them the way you compare maps, noticing scale, color, repetition, and small deviations that felt important.

A while later, my son began altering origami patterns. A wing sharpened here, an abdomen angled and lengthened there. The folds grew less obedient, more speculative, more organic. We watched a breathtaking video in which folded paper springs into life just when it is needed, and we began to treat our own paper that way—as provisional, adaptable. We folded alternate cicadas, drew them, revised them and their imagined stories.

In the space between husk and fold, small stories began to gather—nothing fixed, just forms trying on their next iteration. They belonged to the table, the afternoon, the space between us. These are some of those husks."