“I have always felt caught between two languages, though I can only speak in one,” visual artist and writer Sara Baume reflects in her latest book. “The one I can speak goes down on paper . . . the one I cannot speak goes down in small painted objects.” Through Baume’s Handiwork, a compendium of word and image, both of these dialects converge. Such a reconciliation is a feat for any artwork, but particularly for one as diminutive as this. Its pint-sized print edition is itself an objet d’art.
Following her novels Spill Simmer Falter Wither and A Line Made by Walking, Handiwork is Baume’s first non-fiction book. Its form is equally polyglot, blending memoir with art and nature writing, and meditations on