Attention's Loop: A Sculptor's Reverie on the Coexistence of Substance and Spirit

"This is a book about attention and memory. I am a sculptor, so it is also a book about size, dirt, artifice, work, and eye. The text is a set of stories and interruptions that pile up to make a play of overlapping loops. My organizing principle is the image of the round-trip, so one may open the book and step into it at any point. Most of [the] photographs are of a single sculpture. It is a self-portrait, a particular kind of round-trip, and it is small: one-half life-size. Called Pupil, it is jointed and movable and I pose it. I think of it as an instrument."

So writes the sculptor Elizabeth King in the foreword of her book, Attention's Loop. Both book and sculpture grow out of King's interest in finding ways to articulate how the mind experiences time. A philosophical essay in image and text, this artist's book challenges the expectation that an image will only illustrate the writing that surrounds it. The recognizably figurative sculpture that serves as the focus of the book is both subject and speaker. Attention's Loop simultaneously addresses and enacts the complexity of representation, and of consciousness itself.

Attention's Loop won a design award in the American Institute of Graphic Arts "50 Books/50 Covers 1999" competition, and a Merit Award for Design in the 1999 New York Book Show.

Elizabeth King is an artist whose work combines sculpture, film, and installation. She makes objects, sets them in motion with stop-frame film animation, then presents object and film together to challenge the boundary between actual and virtual space. Intimate in scale -- she speaks of a theater for an audience of one -- and distinguished by a level of craft that solicits close viewing, the work reflects her interests in early clockwork automata, the history of the mannequin and the puppet, and literature's host of legends in which the inanimate or artificial figure comes to life.

Awards for her work include a 2002 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 1996-97 Bunting Fellowship in the Visual Arts at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, Harvard University. Her work is in permanent collections in the Hirshhorn Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She is represented in New York by Kent Gallery and by the Allan Stone Gallery. She teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University as School of the Arts Research Professor in the Department of Sculpture.