The Missouri State Journal. A weekly program keeping you in touch with Missouri State University. 
All types of art can represent life and emotion. And it's also often said that this art can help us process our feelings and express the deepest set of our sentiments. I'm Nicki Donaldson. Today my guest is Jennifer Rose Wolken. Master of Fine Arts of visual studies, student at Missouri State University. She is here to describe her recent exhibited work. 
Jennifer: The book that was exhibited at the art museum the first two weeks of May, it is a sculptural form that is based in book binding. Based in book arts, and it started as a bit of a memorial to my dad. The first idea for it was to make a book that has either a page or a leaf for every day that he lived, and so I calculated that up, and he would have loved the math involved in that. I'm not as into math as he was, but it was a fun process to calculate and taking into account leap years and all that kind of thing. He lived 22,672 days. So he died of cancer December 26th, 2015, and that's embossed on the back cover of the book. The front cover has his birthdate. 
Nicki: This book was made in response to an open ended project to the semester and it allowed Wolken to challenge herself. She would make the longest book she could, but it was also an opportunity to grieve for her father, who's life had been cut short. 
Jennifer: The making of the book itself was very cathartic for me. I tea stained all of the pages. That process took about 70 hours, and I did that in my basement with an assistant, and those assistants were my best friend and my mom and my sister who were all close to dad during the last weeks and months of his life too, and saw that process just as much as I did and so, that process of tea staining those pages that represented the days of his life was very cathartic for all of us, and generated conversation about him and about losing him that I think was very helpful for all of us. 
And also once we got the whole thing made and put on the pedestals at the art museum, we all talked about how his life was cut short and how sad that was, but seeing that piece representing the length of his life helped us to appreciate that he did have a long life and a very full life and so that was helpful too.
Nicki: Students who are pursuing a master of fine arts in visual studies at Missouri State, designed a personalized program. One that fits their goal as an artist. Although Wolken had many ideas, she wanted to develop something that was memorable and meaningful. 
Jennifer: So I had an instructor early in the program that saw some of my work, and he suggested, "Well, why don't you try to make the longest book you can?". And at the time I thought, "Well that's a cool idea, but what would be the point of it"? After I had lost my Dad, I was thinking about that a lot in my work, and I was thinking about grief and dealing with his death, and so I decided this semester that it would be interesting to visualize his lifespan in the span of a large book, thinking back on what that instructor had told me. So that would be a reason, a purpose, for the longest book I could sew. 
So it ended up with 22,672 leaves, which is a leaf is two pages, it's the one sheet that makes the front page/back page. And it ended up being almost 20 feet. It's about 19 feet 8 and a half inches or something like that. And that's the spine of it. The actual pages are only about 3 by 3 and half inches. They're pretty small.
Nicki: Book binding is a long standing traditional art form. It's a skill that Wolken has honed over her lifetime, including making journals, guest books, and sketchbooks for friends, family and profit.
Jennifer: I actually bound my first book at age 9, but then I kind of forgot about that, and then when I was in college as an undergrad for graphic design I had a typography teacher who encouraged us to take books that we had designed on the computer, the book layout, and actually bind it in a physical form and get creative with that so that we understood how it went together in printing production, and why certain things needed to be in a certain order. So from those projects I fell in love with the binding process. 
Nicki: That was Jennifer Rose Wolken, student in Missouri State's MFA of visual studies program. I'm Nicki Donaldson for the Missouri State Journal.
For more information, contact the office of University communications at 417-836-6397. The Missouri State Journal is available online at KSMU.org.