TRANSFIGURATION

How the Book Performs

TRANSFIGURATION activates memory through material encounter rather than illustration. Photographic sequencing, painterly intervention, and erasure operate together to produce tension between what is seen, what is withheld, and what cannot be recovered. The book stages a slow oscillation between fragile specificity and ungraspable scale.

Meaning emerges through repetition, interruption, and material instability. The reader encounters images not as evidence to be consumed, but as presences that resist closure.

Structure & Form

The book unfolds as a deliberate sequence of photographic and materially transformed images. A vernacular portrait of Maria functions as an anchoring presence, while subsequent images move between figurative trace, abstraction, and altered surfaces.

Images are hand-worked through layered processes, producing surfaces that oscillate between photographic trace and painterly skin. Text appears sparingly, forming a parallel register rather than explanatory narration. The codex structure is essential: bound, finite, and encountered in time. The book insists on duration and physical engagement as conditions of meaning.

Narrative Presence

Maria operates not as biography but as a focal point through which survival, starvation, and historical disappearance are articulated. The work resists singular representation, holding Maria as both specific and emblematic—at once an individual child and a cipher for countless others whose lives were erased or irreparably altered.

The image of Maria persists across the book as a fragile anchor, while surrounding images fracture, erode, and transform. This instability mirrors the collapse of historical continuity and the insufficiency of images to contain trauma. What emerges is not narrative closure, but a sustained condition of witness.

Editions

TRANSFIGURATION is issued as a limited edition artist book, with a Special Edition incorporating an additional unique work element.

Limited edition of 18 copies
Plus 4 Artist Proofs

Each copy is signed and numbered.

Materials & Production

Material decisions privilege tactility, fragility, and transformation. Photographic images are hand-worked through layered, painterly and wax-based interventions, producing surfaces that register physical labor, alteration, and temporal density rather than optical finish.

Text elements are letterpress printed. Select interior papers were custom-produced incorporating archival linen fibers. The volume is bound in full cloth and housed in a cloth-covered clamshell case, emphasizing containment, protection, and long-term stewardship.

Relationship to Larger Practice

TRANSFIGURATION is an early and foundational artist book within Maruschak’s practice. It establishes concerns that continue across her later projects: the use of the book as a performative object, the transformation of photographic source through material intervention, and the engagement with inherited and collective trauma through restrained visual language.

Produced at Maine Media Workshops and College, where Maruschak was selected as Book Artist in Residence, TRANSFIGURATION remains the only book she has realized entirely independently, including printing, image production, and binding. The project marks a formative moment in which material process, photographic sequencing, and book form became inseparable within her methodology.