Artists’ Books News, December 2016
Exhibitions
Enitharmon Artists’ Books, Enitharmon Editions, London
Throughout December
This exhibition brings together the definitive collection of artists’ books that Enitharmon has published since 1987. Made in the traditional style of the livre d’artiste, Enitharmon artists’ books are letterpress-printed on luxurious sheets of paper, hand-bound, and paired with unbound original prints. With a rich literary history, primarily in poetry, Enitharmon is ideally placed by circumstance and tradition to produce works of art in the form of books – objects of beauty and craftsmanship.
Working in collaboration with writers, artists, printmakers, designers, typesetters and bookbinders of the highest quality, Enitharmon Director Stephen Stuart-Smith has, over 30 years created this unique collection of artists’ books, defined by its deluxe characteristics, and the participation of highly distinguished artists and writers such as Peter Blake, Paula Rego, Harold Pinter, David Hockney, Michael Craig-Martin and Jim Dine.
Interactive and easily portable, each artist’s book is a highly collectible piece of fine art to treasure, and each edition is the culmination of a particular project with a carefully selected artist, which accounts for the visual diversity on display. This intimate exhibition, shown in the Enitharmon gallery & bookshop in Bloomsbury, provides a chance to learn about the creation of deluxe artists’ books, and perhaps to buy one for yourself.
Enitharmon Editions, 10 Bury Place, London, WC1A 2JL, UK
http://www.enitharmon.co.uk
Free entry. Open 10am – 6pm, Monday-Friday
William Kentridge and Vivienne Koorland : ‘Conversations in Letters and Lines’
Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh
Until 19th February 2017
This exhibition brings together work of two of South Africa’s foremost visual artists, William Kentridge (animated film maker, opera director, performer and draughtsman) and Vivienne Koorland (painter, printmaker and maker of objects). Kentridge and Koorland come from the same generation of South African artists. Born in the 1950s, they first met as university students in the mid-1970s when Kentridge was studying political science at the University of the Witwatersrand and Koorland was studying fine art at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. They have been talking about art ever since. This exhibition foregrounds a friendship of nearly forty years and a dialogue which has been mutually enriching as the practice of each has informed that of the other.
For both artists, questions of reading and looking are posed by the inclusion of text. The bookish (its associations with the learned and schooled as well as the reference to books as traditional bearer and bringer of words) features literally in both practices. Koorland has been painting on old book pages since the 1980s, as works like Vive Maman attest to, and Kentridge has used books as the ground of his work since the late 1990s. More recently he has explored the effects of the filmed ‘flip-book’ where reading and looking, in time and on screen, become part of the point of the work. We will show a range of these produced between 2011 and 2014. The synergies between these diverse but related practices is compelling. It will allow us to look at each artist afresh in the belief that the specificity of each will become more visible, while the historical/cultural links between them are revealed.
Fruitmarket Gallery, 45 Market Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1DF. http://www.fruitmarket.co.uk
Interesting links
Read about a new artist’s book made by Marian Crawford for the State Library of Queensland, Picturing the Island, along with a companion work Manaeba/meeting house, produced for her Siganto Foundation Creative Fellowship at SLQ in Brisbane, Australia: http://blogs.slq.qld.gov.au/ala/2016/10/24/marian-crawford-dictionary-pictionary-making-picturing-the-island/
Claudia de la Torre’s Backbone Books has a brand-new website, with information on current and archived projects, exhibitions and details of books for sale at: www.backbonebooks.net
Artists’ Books Fairs and Events
‘Cultural Traffic’, the new publishing arts fair, is on Saturday 17th & Sunday 18th December 2016. The UK’s first annual fair for dealers in counterculture and independent producers to trade books, zines, prints, catalogues, vinyls and tapes in both current and obsolete format. Juju’s Bar & Stage, The Old Truman Brewery, Ely’s Yard, 15 Hanbury Street, London, E1 6QR. http://culturaltraffic.com
Save the Dates
Bristol Artists’ Book Event (BABE) at Arnolfini, UK
Saturday 1st and Sunday 2nd April 2017
Organised by Arnolfini and the Centre for Fine Print Research, the sixth biennial festival of artists’ book-making features the work of artists and small presses from around the world. Since 2007, BABE has established a great reputation as a relaxed and friendly event to meet and chat to book artists about their work and buy works of art.
babeatarnolfini.jpg
BABE 2017 will feature artists from all over the UK, The Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Norway, Sweden and South Korea. With more than ninety exhibitors taking part, and prices starting from just a few pounds, there will be something for everyone.
Read more about our last BABE event here:
http://www.bookarts.uwe.ac.uk/projects/babe.html
Expect performances, exhibitions, interventions, talks and workshops across the weekend too, including: Collective Investigations, Stephen Fowler’s BABE passport project, Nancy Campbell’s Polar Tombola, and live printing with Double Dagger. Come along and celebrate our tenth anniversary with us!
http://www.arnolfini.org.uk/whatson/babe-2017-bristol-artists-book-event
#BABE2017
Dates have been announced for the next Artists’ Book Market at BALTIC, UK – 13th & 14th May 2017. https://artistsbookmarketbaltic.wordpress.com
New Artists’ Publications
How To Say ‘I Love You’ In Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet by Nancy Campbell.
MIEL’s reissue of Campbell’s evocative images and text fragments is digitally printed on 300gsm all-cotton stock, wrapped in glassine, and accompanied by a booklet of text by the artist/writer.
Emma Stibbon, RA, on the original edition of How to Say ‘I Love You’ in Greenlandic: ‘In this beautiful publication Nancy Campbell magically manages to evoke the icy North through the warmth and power of the Greenlandic language. Exquisite pochoir prints sit alongside hand-printed type – a perfect marriage between image and text.’
Nancy Campbell’s poems and artists’ books examine the changing life of the harbour communities of northern Europe and the Arctic. Her works include The Night Hunter and Tikilluarit (both published by Z’roah Press) and How To Say ‘I Love You’ In Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet. Nancy is Visual and Performing Artist in Residence at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford, and editor of Printmaking Today magazine. How To Say ‘I Love You’ In Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet received the Birgit Skiöld Award in 2013.
Twelve 4 x 6 inch cards, 300gsm, 12-page booklet, 120gsm. Glassine wrapper. Published 31 October 2016. Numbered edition of 300.
http://miel.bigcartel.com/product/how-to-say-i-love-you-in-greenlandic-an-arctic-alphabet-nancy-campbell
Voice of Sea 2016 by Pat Hodson
Voice of Sea evolved from a cross-disciplinary project with a poet and a sound artist for the ‘Shakespeare Now’ exhibition at the Hornby Library, Liverpool in June 2016. The original was a projected sequence which integrated word, image and sound.
In the book, ‘Sea’ is formed from layers of words and fragments of words. Word becomes image. Through this, page by page, the poem drifts, and emerges line by line. In the poem, ‘Sea’ talks to Shakespeare, accusing him of ‘stealing storms’ and drowning his characters.
A continuous fold book of 36 pages, with pages folded at the fore-edge and stitched in the gutter, collapsing into its cover. Inkjet pigment print on Amari Matt paper, (190gsm) with cover of Innova cotton paper (220gsm) 26.5 x 18.5 cm (closed) limited edition of 50, printed on demand, each copy numbered. £45
Image, design and production by Pat Hodson, with words by Liz Cashdan.
Millhouses Books, 26 Hartington Road, Sheffield S7 2LF.
Michael Gibbs, All or Nothing and Other Pages. Edited by Gerrit Jan de Rook & Andrew Wilson.
A survey of the work of Michael Gibbs, whose activities included poetry, performance, film, and publishing, and his immersion in what he called ‘a genuinely “underground” culture… which owed nothing to the official art establishment’. As well as visual poetry and texts, the book includes his major study of blank books All or Nothing…’, written in 2005, a selection of critical writing that originally appeared in Kontexts and Artzien journals that he edited and published, as well as articles from the photography journal Perspektief and Art Monthly, for which he wrote a regular column. A chronology of examples of his visual and concrete poems, books and photography is reproduced, along with documentation of performances.
Critical commentaries about aspects of Michael Gibbs’ work by Gerrit Jan de Rook, concrete poetry and language art; Guy Schraenen, books and publishing; Marga van Mechelen, performance works; John Held, mail art; Henriette Dingemans, internet work; Rob Perrée, photographic works and Bas Vroege, critical writing.
Michael Gibbs was born in Croydon, Surrey in 1949, and after his involvement with Beau Geste Press in the early 1970s he moved to the Netherlands, where he continued to work with experimental poetry and text, publishing, performance and installation. During the 1990s he developed ideas and formats for the web, launching the website Whynotsneeze? in 1996, ‘a site for critical art on and about the internet’, and continued to write commentaries and criticism up to his death in 2009.
Published by Uniformbooks. 224pp, with 76 pages of black and white illustrations. ISBN 978 1 910010 13 6. 234 x 142, paperback with flaps, £16. http://www.colinsackett.co.uk/allornothing.php
ED/MN Edited By Maurizio Nannucci: Editions And Multiples 1967/2016. Published by Viaindustriae
Focusing on Italian contemporary artist Maurizio Nannucci’s practice, this book offers for the first time a comprehensive overview of his extraordinary creativity as publisher and producer of editions and multiples, as well as artists’ books, catalogues, prints, photographs, posters, records and more. His field of research has expanded since the 1960s, exploring language and the intersection of disciplines such as linguistics, literature, music, philosophy and architecture. With a plethora of images and archival documents, as well as critical essays, the origins of fundamental aspects of Nannucci’s artistic vision and his attitude to developing art as an open social project are detailed.
408pp, ills colour & bw, 17 x 25 cm, paperback, Italian/English. Distributed by Idea Books & Les Presses du Réel. ISBN9788897753230. £30.00
http://www.ideabooks.nl/9788897753230-ed-mn-edited-by-maurizio-nannucci-editions-and-multiples-1967-2016
