Unfolding the Object – The Structure of Celestial Navigation 

Holding Karen Hanmer’s Celestial Navigation in my hands for the first time, I immediately realized that this book refused to be read in a single “traditional” way. It did not want me to turn pages but rather asked me to unfold space. Hinged triangles opening across the table, lifting into small pyramids. With this piece of Art, reading becomes a kind of positioning. Each fold is an active decision about where to stand.

The object is made from pigment inkjet prints on thick board. A dark field of stars covers the surface. White labels name the constellations and instruments. Each triangle is about fifteen centimeters per side, joined by narrow black hinges that let the whole thing bend and re-form almost freely. Closed, it is the size of a small notebook, about 6.75 by 5.75 by 0.5 inches. Open, it extends to roughly 17.5 by 30 inches. Both faces are printed. One side shows a nineteenth-century star chart, while the other side shows engraved images of astronomical tools like a quadrant, an astrolabe, a sextant and a telescope. You can lay the work flat like a map or raise parts of it into shape. The format invites touch and decision.

Across the stars there are only a few lines of text. “I don’t remember what you looked like.”, “I see your face in the stars.”, “Each remembers the sound of your voice.” The sentences are plain. They come in as signals. They do not explain themselves. The artist describes the work as a brief poem set against a catalog of instruments and a NASA photograph of the Milky Way (Artist’s Book News, 2008). That pairing is what matters. Precision beside memory, navigation beside absence.

The sources sit in the colophon. Alexander Jamieson’s Celestial Atlas (1822), Tycho Brahe’s Astronomiae instauratae mechanica (1602) and Joseph Moxon’s A Tutor to Astronomy and Geography (1674). These sources connect the work to a long history of mapping the sky. When the book is opened, its panels unfold into a network of connected triangles, each meeting at an edge to form small corners and seams. Some words run across these folds, continuing from one panel to the next. 

This copy is number fifteen of an edition of thirty. It is signed and lives in the Special Collections at San Diego State University (call number N 7433.4 H356 C45 2008). The hinges show small signs of use and the edges are slightly worn. Otherwise the condition is excellent. Because each copy is hand-assembled, there are small differences from one to the next. That matters. It reminds me that even with the same instruments, navigation still remains personal.

As an object, the book comes out of the artist’s book tradition where form does the thinking. The triangular system is not decorative but functional, determining how the pages open and close. Triangles fold and unfold, aligning and realigning with each movement. The reader’s eye moves from a word to a star name to a diagram, following a rhythm set by the hinges. The work is designed for a slower pace, as if each shape needs a moment to settle before the next one forms.

In the end, Celestial Navigation feels like a map that unfolds at its own pace. The stars, the diagrams, the brief lines of text, never holding a single shape for long. With each turn of the hand, something new comes into view, drawing fresh lines between image and word. The book asks for patience. It wants to be handled slowly. Through this quiet movement, it shows that reading can also be a kind of finding one’s way.

The Beautiful Infinity of Celestial Navigation

What first drew me to Celestial Navigation was its shape. I had never seen a book like it before. I had held scrolls, codices, artist’s books in boxes or sleeves, but never something that folded into a constellation of triangles. The form itself felt like a small discovery. It carried its own sense of curiosity, as if the book had been built to ask what else a book could be.

What fascinates me most is how directly it connects to what I have been thinking about for weeks: books as spaces. Here that word has a double meaning. It is space as in the universe, with stars, constellations, navigation, but also a space as in room, structure, physical presence. Hanmer’s book brings both together until they almost mirror each other. The pages are literal pieces of space, hinged rooms that can open, shift and connect. Each triangle feels like its own small chamber. The reader moves from one to the next the way a traveler moves through connected rooms. Every time the panels are rearranged, a new space appears.

The artist provides the materials and the furniture and the reader can design the interior, becoming the architect who arranges them. The book is what you make of it. Its geometry is open to interpretation and every configuration builds another kind of room. When I fold the triangles into pyramids, it becomes a three-dimensional structure, something that occupies actual space instead of lying flat on the table. Suddenly the book looks outward, projecting into the room, asking to be seen from different angles. It is no longer a surface but a small architecture. At one point, while carefully experimenting with possible alignments of the triangles, I arranged the panels so that one triangle opened toward me like a doorway. And that was the moment it hit me. Suddenly I could look into the book, not just at it. The light caught the inside planes and left the center dark. It was the first time a book had ever felt like a literal room. Something with depth that I could almost enter. That was the moment when I realized how much this book really stood apart from any other book I had ever seen and it perfectly connected to my ongoing thoughts. The book as an interface, as a space the reader inhabits. In Celestial Navigation this metaphor becomes reality. The book constructs an interior. It builds a space that exists between text and reader, image and body.

The connection to outer space deepens it even more. When the folded book stands before me, its dark interior looks like a pocket of the cosmos. The farther I look inside, the less light reaches the center. The printed stars at the edges fade into shadow until they disappear. It feels like looking into infinity. Like staring into a miniature universe made of paper. What I find remarkable is that this effect arises entirely from form rather than digital illusion or cinematic tricks. It is a planetarium built out of pages. 

I have always loved planetariums. The experience of lying beneath a dome of projected stars is one of total immersion. You feel both small and completely surrounded at the same time. Hanmer’s book somehow recreates that feeling at the scale of the hand. I can hold this universe between my palms. In that sense, it becomes a pocket planetarium. A literal space in my pocket. What strengthens that effect is the simplicity of the text. “I don’t remember what you looked like,” “I see your face in the stars,” “Each remembers the sound of your voice”. Scattered among the stars, these fragments do not tell a story. They echo softly through the space of the book. They are signals, small transmissions. Because there is so little text, the gaps become part of the experience. The emptiness around the words feels immense, like the vast distances between stars. Even when a triangle carries more text, it never fills the frame. Everything remains surrounded by open sky. Within that scale, even long sentences appear small, perfectly capturing a key aspect of space: In the vastness of the universe, even the largest structures seem tiny.

For me, that spatial contrast between the smallness of the triangles and the vastness they suggest, is what gives the book its emotional weight. The scale reminds me how memory  works. Fragments floating in the distance, each one distinct but connected by invisible lines. Hanmer’s pairing of precise astronomical diagrams with these personal, almost fragile sentences turns navigation into a metaphor for remembering. The instruments mark position, the voice marks loss.

What also fascinates me is the sense of active participation the book demands. Because the structure can be arranged in countless ways, no two readers will ever have the same experience. Each person chooses where to begin, how far to unfold, what shape to stop at. Reading becomes an act of design. That interactivity makes the reader part of the book’s authorship. It feels intentional, as if Hanmer wanted each viewer to become a part of the book, shaping a personal constellation out of shared materials. I noticed this most clearly when I began to handle the book myself. I started turning the triangles, folding them backward, building small forms, reversing them again (very carefully). The process activated something creative in me. It made me think through movement. The book sparked the same kind of energy I feel when I make something myself. When an idea I have suddenly gets shaped and turns into a form I can hold. The difference is that here the form already exists, but its meaning is still very much open. My task is to discover it through motion.

That openness is what makes Celestial Navigation so distinct. Most books, even artist’s books, guide the reader through a predetermined sequence. Hanmer’s piece does not. It offers possibility instead of instruction. The hinges act like coordinates through which the reader plots the route. The act of navigation is both literal and conceptual. Just as celestial navigation in history relied on observing fixed stars to find one’s position, Hanmer’s book requires attention to movement and relation. Meaning arises not from what the book says but from where it is placed and how it is held. That way, every reading becomes a unique experience. The form ensures that the book will never look exactly the same twice. The next person who unfolds it will see different constellations of triangles, different alignments of text and image. In this sense, Celestial Navigation reflects the universe it depicts. Limitless in potential arrangement. Just as the cosmos has no single center, this book has no single way of being read.

When fully unfolded, the pattern of triangles spreads like a map or even a game board. I find myself tracing a path across it, triangle by triangle, as if I am moving along a route. Each segment offers a new image or a short phrase, either a stop or a step. That movement through panels feels like walking through rooms. The geometry becomes a kind of architecture of attention. The three-dimensional form intensifies that sense of scale. The book can rise into small pyramids that reach into the air, escaping two-dimensionality, as if the stars printed on its surface had begun to lift off the page. When I look into one of these pyramids, I see both the physical material and the illusion of endless space. The experience folds outer and inner worlds so that I am both in front of the book and inside it.

That merging of worlds is what makes Celestial Navigation resonate so strongly with the ideas Amaranth Borsuk discusses in The Book. Borsuk writes that “the book accommodates us, and we accommodate to it.” (Borsuk, p. 198) Hanmer’s work performs that exchange literally. The book moves with my hands as I move with its geometry. The interface is physical, the dialogue is spatial, turning reading into a quiet exchange. In this way, Hanmer carries the idea of the book as interface out into the cosmos. Her work does not simply represent the universe. It builds one. Reading turns into a way of finding direction, of learning how to move through the dark. The reader becomes a navigator, aligning fragments the way sailors once aligned stars. Every repositioning of the panels becomes a recalibration, a way of asking, where am I now?

That question stayed with me long after the book was closed. The memory of holding Celestial Navigation remained, partly in the hands, partly in thought. It reminded me that space, whether cosmic or on the page, is never fixed. It is something we build as we move through it. Hanmer’s book holds that truth gently, offering the tools, the constellations, the fragments of a voice and leaving the rest to us. Each time I returned to it, the configuration changed. The triangles met at new edges, shadows fell differently. I realized that the book’s real subject might be attention itself. The way focus shifts, the way meaning appears only through relation. The form teaches me to look slowly, to accept that not everything must resolve into a single pattern.

In the end, Celestial Navigation turns reading into an act of navigation, of orientation through memory, light and touch. It shows that a book can be both a map and a space, an object and an environment. Hanmer’s structure makes the reader part of its constellation. It is a book that asks not to be read, but to be explored, acting as a gentle reminder that meaning, like the stars, depends on where we stand when we look.