Sea Change & Map Building Set. by Covell, Anne - 2019.

La Mesa, California:: Anne Covell,, 2019.. Edition of 25 variants. 9.5 x 1.25 x 12.5 inches (closed). Letterpress printed from photopolymer plates by Boxcar Press on an SP-15 Vandercook Proof Press in the UF School of Art + Art History Type Shop on Somerset Velvet and Masa papers. Designed and printed by Anne Covell during a semester long residency in the fall of 2019. Numbered. Anne Covell: "'Sea Change' is a letterpress printed artist book and companion print series that uses catastrophe modeling to map the projected impact of sea level rise on the Florida Peninsula if action is not taken to combat climate change. In this book, state and regional maps of the Florida Peninsula repeat page by page with hand-cut paper corrections that reflect projections for coastal impacts for up to ten feet in sea level rise. The corresponding text on the verso of each repeating image of the Florida Peninsula rises on the page in tandem with index tabs that visually mark predictions in two foot increments. Each map correction is letterpress printed, hand-cut, and pasted on the page directly over the previous correction. As projections increase, the layers of corrections overlap and fill the page, physically marking an evolving landscape with permanent adhesion. "The system of mapping used in this book was inspired by research and study of the print holdings of the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps of Florida in the Map & Imagery Library, most notably Miami, vol. 1, 1921 containing a record of 28 paper corrections dating from 1928 - 1950. Originally created to allow fire insurance companies to assess risk and liability to urbanized areas within the United States, these maps were published in volumes that were bound and corrected by 'pasters' who were employed to cut and glue over outdated maps until a new volume was produced.  "The companion print series to the artist book, titled, 'Sea Change: Catastrophe Map Building Set' presents an alternate way of experiencing the project. In this set, three letterpress printed base maps are included with un-cut maps for each layer of corrections. Instructions are included for how to cut and paste each layer by hand with the idea in mind that physically doing the labor to correct the maps with each new prediction will foster a deeper understanding of what is at stake in Florida if action is not taken to combat climate change. However, sea level rise projections can also be viewed without cutting and pasting for those who wish to keep the set intact. Each base map can simply be placed on a light box and the layers added one at a time to reveal the changes. "The source material for the map images in this book were drawn from worst case scenario predictions from the NOAA Sea Level Rise Viewer (https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/). The text is written from research collated from several key sources including most notably the Fourth National Climate Assessment (https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/) and the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming (https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/).