Attention's Loop

"This is a book about attention and memory. I am a sculptor, so it is also a book about size, dirt, artifice, work, and eye. The text is a set of stories and interruptions that pile up to make a play of overlapping loops. My organizing principle is the image of the round-trip, so one may open the book and step into it at any point. Most of [the] photographs are of a single sculpture. It is a self-portrait, a particular kind of round-trip, and it is small: one-half life-size. Called Pupil, it is jointed and movable and I pose it. I think of it as an instrument."

So writes the sculptor Elizabeth King in the foreword of her book, Attention's Loop. Both book and sculpture grow out of King's interest in finding ways to articulate how the mind experiences time. A philosophical essay in image and text, this artist's book challenges the expectation that an image will only illustrate the writing that surrounds it. The recognizably figurative sculpture that serves as the focus of the book is both subject and speaker. Attention's Loop simultaneously addresses and enacts the complexity of representation, and of consciousness itself.

Attention's Loop won a design award in the American Institute of Graphic Arts "50 Books/50 Covers 1999" competition, and a Merit Award for Design in the 1999 New York Book Show.