Ursa Major is a book with a poetic quality. A painstakingly crafted object that intrigues, without the material it deals with being immediately apparent. Two thick boards made from greyboard sandwich ten page sections. The book’s title is represented subtly on its cover, through a depiction of the Great Bear constellation – Ursa Major – in yellow dots embossed in the greyboard. The yellow of the foil is echoed visually in the thread on the open spine, where the coloured spines of the different sections form a tie-dyed effect. It becomes apparent when looking at the fore edge that this interplay of colours is the result of the colours of the paper used for the outer sheets of each section: light brown, dark green, red, bright green and pink.
As on the cover, not a single word can be found in the interior. There is however an enclosed bookmark on which five cryptic lines are printed that participate in the visual narrative set up by the photographs. As well as of coloured paper, the sections are made up of two other types of paper: light, and even lighter. The coloured pages are printed only in black, creating a powerful effect at the spreads between sections, where the two pages are of differing colours. The photos on the other paper types are printed partly in black-and-white and partly in full colour; then there are also pages that have been left blank – the whole effect is one of total balance.
The colour play between the paper types, the thread and the photos, the tactile interplay of thicker and thin paper, the rock-solid, poetic picture editing and the superb lithography all go to make up an aesthetically pleasing product.