London-based artist and designer Sarah Boris has created a modular exploration of colour and form with Rainbow, a pair of wordless books which gradually reveal the familiar arches through pages of beautifully layered paper.

“Books are often the beginning of my artistic practice,” Sarah Boris tells Creative Boom. “Perhaps the book even becomes a way of sketching.” In the last few years, books have also become one of Sarah’s favourite means of artistic exploration, and with Rainbow, she uses them as a jumping-off point to explore new creative pathways.

Described as an illegible book, Rainbow is a pair of silent, wordless volumes that act as “an ode to colour and shape”. Made up of a sequence of seven symmetrical half circles, Rainbow is a “sensory experience” that calls both sight and tactility into play.

“The book is also an object with a sculptural dimension,” Sarah reveals. “The motion of turning the pages generates a shifting composition and a suite of ensembles made of half and quarter circles. Finally, the centre spread reveals the full rainbow.”

The pair of books are split into Rainbow 1 and Rainbow 2. Rainbow 1 features bright colours as they appear in nature. Rainbow 2, on the other hand, contains neon hues and pastel colours.

“When I made the first prototypes for the book, I felt compelled to propose two different colour ways, which resulted in these two volumes being released at the same time,” Sarah explains. “They are independent of one another but can also co-exist and be collected together. We could say that Rainbow 1 is the classical version and Rainbow 2 is an interpretation of the rainbow.”

Before settling on the colour ways for the books, Sarah explored and played with tinted colour papers from around the world. “I finally settled on a range of Japanese papers by Takeo for volumes 1 & 2,” she says. “The colour pigments are unique. They are extremely vibrant and beautiful and bear no equal in their proposed colour range.

“I became very particular about each colour and how they function with one another. Choosing and assembling colours is similar to writing a composition and seeking harmony and rhythm. Any digital representation can’t quite do justice to the book.

“As with all books, you must handle it physically in order to experience it. This, to me, reinforces the power of print and physical artwork. It cannot exist in the same way in the digital realm and cannot be replicated online. It calls for manipulation, touch, and display. It’s a call for action, too. Books are far from being passive objects. They entice us into action.”

The prototype for the book can trace its origins back to the lockdown of 2020. Sarah had a lot of paper samples from previous projects lying around the studio, so she started to assemble the two books by hand. “It felt important to visualise the idea physically in order to demonstrate how the book worked,” she says.

“The rainbow theme was recurrent in my work at the time. The rainbow was everywhere in the UK during the lockdown too. It became a symbol of hope and was pasted on people’s windows, drawn in chalk on sidewalks and included on Thank You signage for the NHS staff.

“I showed the prototype to Generation Press during lockdown. We made a very limited edition using G.F Smith Colorplan papers.” Rainbow by Sarah Boris is published by Corners in Seoul and available at Einbuch Haus in Berlin.

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