POP-UP ARTIST BOOK
Spiral Through
Time
Through the spiral of a shell, this book explores life as a continuous cycle of transformation. Using a pop-up format, accompanied by written passages, it reflects metaphors of life, death, and renewal, where each page unfolds to reveal the changes a shell undergoes throughout its lifetime.
How this idea came to be?
For my artist book, I was asked to create a work around the concept of “shell.” While the word itself holds many possible meanings, I was most drawn to the shell as a physical form—specifically, its spiral structure. In exploring this, I became interested in how the shell grows, expanding outward in spirals that echo the Golden Ratio found throughout the natural world.
I was also interested in the life cycle of the shell. It only continues to grow while the organism is alive, but after its death, it undergoes a different kind of transformation. The shell becomes vacant, yet remains active in another sense—able to house new life or still in existence.
From this, the spiral became central to the project as both form and metaphor. It represents life as a non-linear journey of growth, transformation, and evolution—moving through repeated cycles, inward and outward, while continuously progressing toward new understanding, rather than simply returning to the same point.
When coming up with how to tell this story of transformation, I learned about how shells change they undergo striking colour transformations over time.
When the organism is alive, the shell reflects the colours of its surrounding environment (often in stripe formation); after death, these colours fade into warmer tones of orange and brown; and when beached, the shell becomes bleached white. This factual information tied perfectly with the symbolic story telling I wanted to show.
Early forms of Story Boarding
Pop-ups to push the story
As always, my values of layered narratives, is how I start a project but I always push to “illuminate” my ideas in the best way possible. Pop-ups themselves are bold and are in your face a bit, but for such a poetic story, centring around repetition, cycle and continuation, a pop-up lets you take notice of the changes in a more direct manner. What really cemented this idea however was when I came across ‘The Little Tree” by Katsumi Komagata.
Komagata’s work holds a delicate balance between beauty and profound meaning, reflecting on life and its cycles. Through the pop-up format, each page becomes its own little world. It felt as though we are watching the passage of life in this serene, quiet settings, which turn deeply poetic with each turning page. I really wanted to evoke a similar type of connection.
The story follows the shell through life, death, rebirth and continuation
As discussed before, colour plays a heavy role in the storytelling, not just in the colours which the shell factually changes but the different eras of its journey.
The beginning pages, when the shell is alive, is the most vibrant, then dulls with death and takes on a new faded colour with the rebirth. Lastly when it is beached and all its past memory, from the outer shell, is gone, the shell has a new beginning.
“I wanted the spiral, through both its colour and number of coils, to embody themes of life, death, renewal, and continual evolution. ”
The background imagery plays an important role in shaping the narrative of the book. Because the structure uses a centre-fold pop-up, the background becomes an active, changing setting rather than a static surface.
It shifts with each spread, situating the shell within different environments that reflect its journey over time. Shells can travel hundreds of kilometres throughout their lifetime, carried by currents and environmental change. In this way, the shifting backgrounds become a visual trace of movement, suggesting migration, displacement, and the passage of time. They not only frame the shell but also echo its transformation—linking place, life cycle, and change into a continuous narrative.
Production of the Artist Book
“As a spiral grows upwards it also descends downwards” a line from my book, encompasses the stories themes of continuation of life and time, influenced the idea of my front and back cover. I embossed and debossed the front and back, of the covers to carry this message even farther, really feeling the grooves.
