Jeff Millikan

When I was home this past week, I stopped at the Minnesota Center for the Book Arts for some supplies and for some quality work time in their nice cafe. As always, I spent a long time looking through the shop and the gallery. The current exhibit, Quantified Aesthetics, was all about work that featured numbers and formulas.

One piece I really liked was a book by Jeff Millikan (unfortunately, I forgot the exact title of the piece). From what I gathered, Jeff takes old books (this one was a math textbook, I think), covers them with beeswax, and places them in custom bee hives. He tries to use the beeswax to encourage the bees to build honeycomb in certain areas, and eat away at the book in others. It was really fascinating to have the beeswax built directly on the book, and other pages seemed chewed through, showing many layers of text and diagrams.

There were also some photographs of other pieces of his, which were all equally interesting. I've been trying to find more information on him, but have not been too successful yet. I think he might be an adjunct professor of photography at the University of Minnesota, but again, I'm not sure if that's the correct Jeff Millikan.

I did, however, find this single image of a book from this series (which he calls the Insect Manuscripts, if I remember correctly).