May 9 | Building a shapeshifting artist book with bex ya yolk

This one-day workshop invites participants to learn fundamental bookbinding practices to construct an experimental book form that can be displayed and experienced in multiple ways. We will explore how books can expand, transform, unfold, and occupy space—functioning as both narrative structures and sculptural objects.

Participants will be guided through the development, material exploration, and hands-on construction techniques to create a flexible book form that shifts between states (e.g., flat, dimensional, geometric, or sequential) 

No prior bookbinding experience is required but encouraged.

bex ya yolk (they/them) is a visual artist, designer, bookmaker, and educator, based in Chicago, IL. yolk received a BFA in Graphic Design from Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a concentration in Book Arts as a full merit scholar. yolk is the founder of THUNGRY–– a publishing initiative and artists’ book bindery complicating traditional ways of Book building and semantics through experimentation + queering praxis. yolk utilizes the confines of the Artists’ Book, fundamental principles in design, and exploratory methodologies in sculpture to disrupt what we’ve come to understand qualifies a Book. With a research practice rooted in reproductive rights, histories, and design–– yolk focuses on the philosophy of ‘the maternal’, as a theology and a logic to live by. As socio-political landscapes evolve in regards to what is acceptable, legal, and safe for AFAB and queer people, yolk boldly addresses what could come of our collective futurity through subgenres such as: care work, reproductive justice, health care disparities in the U.S, and container technologies making visible the the intersectionalities between the Book and the bodies this research pertains.