A Cabinet of Mammoth Cave Wonders: A Set of Five Artist’s Books Created for Mammoth Cave National Park by Sharon A. Sharp, 2009 Artist-in-Residence
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From my Boone, North Carolina, home, I drove a winding route to the Mammoth Cave National Park realm of incomprehensible complexity—south-central Kentucky’s sinkhole-pocked karst landscape and the labyrinthine, multilevel system of cave passages it harbors. During my October stay I participated in ten cave tours and spent a total of about twenty-six hours in the cave, yet I still saw only a minute portion of this cave system—the longest known one in the world, at almost 400 miles and counting.
A lifelong rockhound, I relished learning about Mammoth Cave’s multi-million-year-old layers, its relation to the Green River’s carving power, and the “roof” of protective rock that keeps the cave dry and allows vast chambers to form. I also came to appreciate the bats, eyeless fish, and other creatures uniquely adapted to the cave, and I enjoyed hiking many of the park’s trails, which led me by springs and sinkholes, sycamores and pawpaws, turkey and deer.
I learned, too, about humans’ more than 3,500 years of connection to this place, from the native peoples who once sought gypsum to the Cave Research Foundation members who are still finding cave passages. The legacies of enslaved African Americans who became world-famous cave guides especially intrigued me, as did the contributions of other early mapmaker-explorers who painstakingly recorded complex routes and a plethora of place-names.
Day by day, my interest grew in creating a set of artist’s books, rather than a single book, to celebrate this complex environment and its history. While at the park, I did extensive journal writing, sketching, and photographing as groundwork for the books. Soon after returning home, I completed a project separate from the planned set—a large “star-tunnel” book for the December Cave Sing celebration, an annual tradition in which visitors decorate a cedar tree and sing carols inside the cave. Descriptions and photos of that book appear at the end of this page.
For the set, I wanted to portray cave and park features through varied book forms and a range of topics. The title, A Cabinet of Mammoth Cave Wonders, came to mind for several reasons. The word cabinet is part of two place-names in the cave (honoring renowned 19th-century scientists), and it reflects centuries-old traditions of keeping room- or case-sized collections of specimens and objects, referred to as wonders or curiosities, before the rise of modern natural history museums. My books became explorations of selected marvels from this cave and park. To house this collection, I created a compartment for each book inside a purchased, archival, black-cloth-covered storage box, which also displays the set’s title.
The set includes the following:
- Beyond Compare—a 96-signature, soft-cover, sewn-binding book that moves like a Slinky toy and incorporates extensive painting and handwritten facts about the cave, as well as a complete wall-sized U.S. Geological Survey topographic map of MCNP cut into the book’s 3” x 3” format (22″ long when fully extended)
- Carver, Sustainer—a 9-signature, soft-cover, Coptic-stitched book about water’s effects on the park’s karst landscape and on cave formation, as depicted through laser-printed text on clear acetate pages encased in multicolored-paper pages with hand-torn designs (5 1/2″ wide x 3 3/4″ high x 1 1/16″ deep)
- Chiropterans of This Karst—a 9-section, origami-style, multifold book about the park’s bat population that incorporates extensive drawings and handwritten facts, plus sections from another USGS topographic map of the park (5″ wide x 5″ high x 1 1/8″ deep; fully opened—forms a multi-angled circle 11 1/2″ in diameter)
- Descent into Particulars: The Maps of Bishop and Kämper—a 14-page accordion-style hard-cover book with clear acetate pages that contain laser-printed information about the explorers and mapmakers Stephen Bishop, Max Kämper, and Ed Bishop, along with their photos, the place-names from their maps, and portions of their maps (closed—11 1/2″ wide x 3 7/8″ high x 13/16″ deep; opened fully—approximately 45″, with less extension providing different multilayered views)
- Notes on the Tiny Fraction—a hard-cover book with a collapsible “fishbone-fold” interior that depicts the tour routes in relation to the cave’s currently known length, represented through paintings and extensive handwritten notes about the cave and my tour experiences (5 1/4″ wide x 9 1/4″ high x 3/8″ deep; opened fully—approx. 24″ long)
To offer the park rangers a first look at the set, I displayed the books in a Visitors Center conference room and answered questions about the bookmaking process. I hope that in future displays at the park, these books, as part of the interpretive programs and archives, may nurture appreciation of this vast, mysterious, essential part of our daily world.
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The residency experiences gave me an inexhaustible store of book-art ideas and a certainty that Mammoth Cave’s wonders are indeed boundless. I deeply appreciate the support of Ranger Eddie Wells and all of the other MCNP staff members who so generously encouraged my work, and I thank the National Park Service for its visionary partnerships with artists.
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As noted above, I also completed an artist’s book for the park’s celebration of the holiday tradition known as Cave Sing. On December 5, 2009, people gathered at Mammoth Cave’s Historic Entrance and retraced the steps of a group who, in 1883, had carried a ten-foot cedar into the so-called Methodist church area of the cave (where a congregation once met), decorated the tree with ribbons and popcorn strings, and merrily sung carols. Cave Sing: Mammoth Cave National Park is a “star tunnel” book—that is, a book in which four multilayered tunnel sections are connected so that the book, when fully opened, forms a star. The book’s imagery and words center on 19th-century customs, and each tunnel section contains layers with silhouettes, historical facts and quotes, and collages with many different papers. When opened into the star, Cave Sing is 12″ high and 18″ from one star point to another. Here are two views:
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Every step in the process of creating this book pulled me more deeply into Mammoth Cave’s rich history. So many more stories, facts, and imaginings to be explored . . .
Thanks to the park experience, I gained an even deeper appreciation for the remarkable, award-winning poetry collection Ultima Thule, by former MCNP ranger Davis McCombs. Also, I joined the National Speleological Society and learned about its wide range of research, education, and conservation activities, as well as the activities of its speleoartist members. Now, I look forward to supporting Mammoth Cave National Park’s unique role in educating the public about fragile, complex cave environments and their broad ecological significance.
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In the summer of 2010, I drew again on information gleaned from my Mammoth Cave experiences when I created two books about bats for submission to the National Speleological Society’s Fine Arts Salon exhibition, at the NSS annual convention. How Bat Entered English deals with how the word bat entered the English language, and I used a “flutter book” structure (developed by master book artist Hedi Kyle) because it fit with early references to a bat as a “flutter mouse.” Great Good/Bad Fortune portrays the sharp contrast between Eastern and Western views of bats, and I used both text and colors to highlight the differences. The movement inherent in this “flag book” form (also originated by Hedi Kyle) provides a sense of the bats being in flight. For anybody interested in these unique, important—and now, endangered—mammals, I’d like to suggest one especially valuable resource: the Bats Conservation International website.