Continua, Column 10: B3/G1/R1

Continua was conceived and created in Katie Murken’s Philadelphia, Pennsylvania studio at 1241 Carpenter Street between 2009 and 2011.  The project started with a curiosity about the relationship between books, geology and time.  Murken has always been drawn to forms and processes that show time as a sequence of moments; individual, yet connected to the past and the future.  Walking to her studio from her home in South Philadelphia, she noticed the discarded phone books left out on stoops and sidewalks.  Exposure to the elements caused the pages to warp and curl until they began to resemble geological strata.  The weathered phone books provided Murken with an image of time that was instinctively familiar and she took some phone books to her studio to experiment with coloring the pages and stacking them into columns.  This simple gesture set the ball rolling for Continua, a series of 24 hand dyed columns built from nearly 1,000 salvaged phone books.
 
Murken acquired the phone books for Continua from Yellowbook's surplus warehouse in Hazleton, Pennsylvania.  Back in her studio, she deconstructed each phone book by removing its cover and breaking it down into smaller sections of various sizes.  She then dipped these sections into baths of acrylic dye to saturate them with color and create a warped effect similar to what she had seen in the weathered phone books.  Finally, the sections were stacked into columns to show a dynamic progression of color.