Jenn Law

pharmacy

Pharmacy (2015) is a collection of one hundred 3D printed ink bottles, each filled with ash made from a specific book. Historically, some of the earliest ink was made from combining carbon ash, fine soot (lampblack) and water, with a binder such as hide glue, and shellac.  Pharmacy is both a library and an apothecary, composed of distilled ideas and philosophies, anticipating new narratives written from those that have come before. While book ash may conjure images of the destructive impulse of censorship, its potential to be transformed into ink ultimately proclaims the futility of such violent attempts at erasure.  This is a work of both mourning and regeneration, speaking to the persistence of knowledge and meaning beyond the printed text.