Libris

(2025 - ongoing)

Libris is a body of work that uses hand-cut and digital collage, photomontage, and found imagery drawn from libraries, starfields, and geological specimens to explore the relationships between knowledge, memory, and deep time. Libraries appear not only as repositories of information but as conceptual structures through which ideas are collected, organized, preserved, and imagined.

Informed by Walde's experience as an academic librarian, the work examines the systems that shape how knowledge circulates and acquires value through classification, access, and authority. Architectural fragments of libraries intersect with astronomical imagery and mineral forms, linking human systems of order to vast cosmic and geological timescales. Together, these assemblages suggest that libraries, like stars and stones, are both records and containers: repositories of accumulated histories that exceed any single act of reading or interpretation.

Recurring throughout the series is the image of the book, particularly the codex, as both object and metaphor. Geological specimens resemble volumes whose strata function as pages, holding traces of deep time within their layered structures. Folds, margins, gaps, and omissions echo the architecture of the library itself, marking spaces where meaning remains suspended, obscured, or yet to be discovered.

Rather than focusing on what is catalogued and known, Libris attends to absence, uncertainty, and the limits of understanding. Through the juxtaposition of libraries, starfields, and stone, the work reimagines knowledge not as a fixed archive but as an evolving constellation of connections, extending across history, memory, and the vast temporal scales of the earth and cosmos.

The prints of Libris are available individually or as a portfolio of 12.