Lillian

1996    Edition of 5    Each panel 9.5 x 12", overall 12 x 57"     One copy available. $3000

Book artists were invited to create original works of art inspired by the Heralds of Science, a 200-volume collection of classic scientific texts housed in the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, Special Collections of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, culminating in the 1995 Smithsonian Institution Libraries Exhibition Science and the Artist's Book. Daiber choose to work with Marcello Malpighi’s Anatome Plantarum in a very personal way, relating images of plant growth to vegetation found near his Massachusetts home, and comparing chicken embryo stages to the pre-natal sonograms of his daughter.

Lillian is an accordion book with six panels. The first and last panels are woodcuts drawn from illustration of Marcello Malpighi’s Anatome Plantarum. The panels in between the woodcuts are four color Xerox collages of pre-natal sonograms, chromosome count,  contractions and fetal heartbeat moments before the birth of his daughter. On the verso are six watercolors of plants found in the fields and woods of Western New England. Overlaying one watercolor is a section of topographic map locating a stand of old growth forest in Western Massachusetts that would have been seedlings at the time of  Malpighi's pioneering book in 1675.