"Tell Me About Your Summer" is a deeply personal collection of artists’ books documenting the painfully transformative experiences I had over the summer of 2021. These books juxtapose the veneer of happiness I put up in pictures from the time, against the hidden depths of three major crises I was undergoing — a medical scare, my family’s rejection of my transgender identity, and a general sense of helplessness as I drifted across North America; unable to return to my home country due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The project consists of four books, each made and produced differently, which document each of the four stages of my summer.

In 2021, I was awarded the Caxton Club Grant for Graduate Projects in Bookmaking for "Tell Me About Your Summer."

A pamphlet-stitched book with alternating large and small pages; the latter contain the book’s narrative prose and serve to conceal selective parts of the larger pages’ photos and designs. The narrative text details my inner turmoil and destructive obsession with a swollen lymph node cancer scare, in spite of the comparatively happier Polaroids paired with them; proof that a picture paints a thousand words but also leaves out a thousand more.

The pages of Book One alternate in size and medium. The larger pages, containing photos from my trip, are a combination of inkjet and risograph printing (in different combinations of PANTONE Warm Red U, Yellow U, 639 U and 804 U) on eggshell-finish 80# paper. The smaller pages, containing narrative text detailing my tumultuous inner feelings during those otherwise innocuous photos, are printed in metallic gold on black paper.

A waterfall flipbook whose pages would contain prose fragments paired with photographs. The narrative details a week of respite and community with friends in an otherwise increasingly chaotic summer. The flipbook format emphasises how quickly the week passed for me — time flies when you’re having fun — and would encourage readers to go through the book again at a slower pace, in the same way that we often savour good memories repeatedly long past when they happened. The book is risograph-printed in faux-CMYK, as the nature of risograph ink is also akin to memory for me — the more you handle them, the more they erode.

A book that starts off folded very small, which readers must fold out into a larger sheet of paper to progress through the narrative. The book format represents my self-suppression due to the transphobia I faced from my conservative relatives in Texas and my family back home. However, as I powered through this, I began to open up as I came closer to leaving that suppressive environment. The book is risograph-printed with a transparent belly band. The fluorescent, high-contrast colour palette and the book’s format (which is shingled and cannot be fully closed without a belly band) are both intended to evoke discomfort, and a physical equivalent to emotional suppression in book form.

Four risograph-printed kaleidocycle books providing kaleidoscopic views of film photographs I took while hiking and staying with my found family in Washington State. The book format represents how, after coming out of a long, difficult and repressive time, being around family who accepted me for who I was felt dreamlike and unreal. Much like previous books, using the risograph for this book serves a similar purpose — everyone must find a balance between constantly revisiting good memories as escapism, and treasuring them to avoid their eventual erosion and warping due to the changing nature of human memory.

The photos printed on the kaleidocycles have been edited to look like actual views seen through a kaleidoscope. The book format and the classic misalignment of the risograph come together to show how, after a long, difficult, and repressive time, being around family who accepted me for who I was felt dreamlike and unreal. As the reader handles these objects over time, the images on them will erode, too; much like how memories, even good ones, fade over time.