Everything Material

by Evan D. Williams

This unique artist’s book was produced using the salted paper process, the first form of paper-based negative-to-positive photography as devised by Henry Fox Talbot in the 1830s. Developed using salt mined under a glacial lake near the artist’s home, these images document his visits to various active and abandoned industrial sites across North America, Europe, and Africa. The series is prefaced by a prose poem that quotes from Jack Kerouac, Cody-Rose Clevidence, and the Monsanto Company. The volume is held together with kaolin-coated paper covers and hand-stitched binding that allows each page to lie completely flat. Produced in collaboration with Heather Lathrop of HCL Gallery, Kernersville, North Carolina, and Stephan Petrella, Brooktondale, New York, this project was completed in 2020 during a residency sponsored by Overland Artworks at Sugar Hill, New York. The book is in the collection of the Ruskin Library at Oxford University.

8 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2020

About the author

Evan D. Williams investigates the quandaries of the numinous and carnal self in a range of documental forms.

His writing has appeared in over fifty publications, including Number, Antennae, Africanah, Lychee Rind, The Ovid Gazette, Punt Volat, and The Sweet Tree Review.

Dear Excavator, his first full-length book, was published by April Gloaming in 2021. Not All the Leopards Are Metaphors, his second collection, was launched in 2024. Brackmeadow: A Poem in Dialogue, was published by Bottlecap Press in 2025.

He has also produced several unique image–text books and zines, including Everything Material (2020, Ruskin Library, Oxford), Terminal Proposals (2023, De Kunstenbibliotheek, Ghent), and Hover States (2025, DobraVaga × Zine Vitrine, Ljubljana).

Williams resides in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains with his wife and cats. He is at work on his next poetry manuscript, A Commentary on United States v. One Black Horse.