Bread and Water

by Alison Knowles

Looking at the cracks in homemade bread, Alison Knowles noticed their resemblance to rivers. Using atlases, she matched each pattern to a river. Bread and Water reproduces in halftone all seventeen palladium prints Knowles processed from xeroxed images of the breads. These prints combine a river image with literary passages and text fragments from books containing geographical and ecological information. Knowles took an acetate sheet and the print "Mud Flats After the Nile Floods the Nibia" and traced the river, the bread's circular edge and the jagged line where the print ends on the paper. She then wrote the poems in this book, placing her template over pages of source material and lifting words and phrases the drawing's lines passed through.

96 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1994