Artists’ Books News, May-June 2018

Artists’ Books News, May-June 2018

Exhibitions

 Queer Between The Covers at Senate House Library, London. Until 16th June 2018.

Curated by Dr Richard Espley & Leila Kassir with public art by Book Artist, Theresa Easton. Queer Between The Covers is a new exhibition and event season at Senate House Library which explores over 250 years of Queer Literature. The exhibition in Convocation Hall, on the 4th floor of Senate House, displays 50 carefully selected works from the collection, showcasing works of satire, autographed manuscripts, illustrated novels and pulp fiction book designs, as well as rare editions of works by famous authors such as Oscar Wilde, WH Auden and Virginia Woolf.

Book artist Theresa Easton has been commissioned to create a series of public artworks using some of the books on display for inspiration to draw out the themes, tensions and celebrations of queer literary history. Theresa Easton commented: “I have drawn on aspects of historical persecution and oppression in the last 150 years to design and print books with a structure that accentuates the subjects covered in each book. I wanted the books to be informative and reflective. There is a seriousness to the experience suffered by Maud Allan and a playfulness to the antics of Djuna Barnes Turkish fold book. Oscar Wilde’s stitched concertina book weaves through ancient Greece and Victorian Britain. Gay’s the Word book design celebrates collective action and solidarity.”

 Senate House Library, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU. The exhibition and related events run until June 2018. Further information, including details of how to visit, see: http://www.senatehouselibrary.ac.uk/exhibitions-and-events

 

Imi Maufe – Translating Travels at Edinburgh Printmakers, until 21st July 2018

Imi Maufe has been turning journeys into books since 2002. Some long, some short. Others short, made long by getting lost. Each book is a concise, conceptual documentation of the events that happened along the way. Modes of travel vary – ten days skiing from hut to hut, five weeks on board a Tall Ship, four months cycling with a small tent, or a short swim downstream. Text combined with signs and symbols is used in a minimal manor. Sometimes the text speaks for itself conjuring up a visual story in short sentences. Imi’s artists’ books and other works attempt to show just a glimpse of her experiences through printed matter that rarely uses the photographic image.

Imi has spent three weeks at EP to print a body of new work and investigated new journeys to be put onto paper through screen and relief prints.

An alternative catalogue is being produced in collaboration with thirty artists and friends who Imi has worked with, travelled with or been inspired by. Each collaborator has contributed with a postcard that translates their travels.

 

Imi Maufe is a British Artist based in Bergen, Norway. She completed a MA in Multi-disciplinary Printmaking at The University of the West of England, Bristol in 2004. Imi frequently exhibits at book fairs, rarely has solo exhibitions, takes up residence in often rural and remote locations, and likes to initiate collaborations. In 2014 she helped established Codex Polaris – a network for artists’ book projects based in Norway. The latest project – Nordic Letterpress Collaboration – POSTED / UNPOSTED has just been launched. http://www.imimaufe.com

 

Edinburgh Printmakers, 23 Union St, Edinburgh EH1 3LR.

Tues-Sat, 10am-6pm. Tel: +44(0)131 557 2479.

http://www.edinburghprintmakers.co.uk

 

Daniel Lehan DAY PAGES exhibition

Bower Ashton Campus Library, UWE Bristol. Until Saturday 30th June 2018

The Saint on the radio reminds me of The Saint on TV with Roger Moore, and also the series The Persuaders with Moore and Tony Curtis. Curtis was married to Christine Kaufman, a friend of Joseph Cornell I think he made a ‘box’ for her. Picked up Metros from station – a yellow concrete mixer with ACE written on it in bright red – a yellow sign which reads Car Wash 7 Days A Week – a parakeet on Nunhead Green.

This is part of the first DAY PAGE entry, dated 23rd February 2015. Cornell was very much in my mind having just read DREAMS, a collection of his dreams, and having found on Deptford Market a film magazine with a photograph of Curtis and Kaufman with their baby. In deciding to keep a daily collaged visual diary I was, of course, tipping my hat towards Cornell.

 

I regret not having kept a diary before. There were brief episodes when I did. But nothing consistent. Now I find a degree of comfort in keeping a diary. It has become a consistent and reassuring part of what I do each day – I can’t imagine NOT keeping a diary. Furthermore, reading it tells me what I did on a particular day, a way of preserving memories of the past.  http://www.daniel-lehan-books.co.uk

UWE Bristol, City Campus at Bower Ashton, Kennel Lodge Road, Bristol BS3 2JT.

http://www1.uwe.ac.uk/about/visitus/campusmapsandinformation/citycampus.aspx

 

 

LIVERPOOL BOOK ART ‘FRANKENSTEIN 2018’ EXHIBITION Opens 14th May 2018 at Liverpool Central Library.

Liverpool Book Art is delighted to present its third major exhibition of Book Art. The theme of the exhibition marks 200 years since the first edition of Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus’ was published.

The exhibition will open at Liverpool Central Library on 14th May in the magnificent Hornby room, and run until 9th August. Liverpool Book Art will host a Private View on Wednesday 16th May 17.30-19.30 (RSVP to liverpoolbookart@gmail.com). The Library is open 7 days a week, apart from Bank Holidays.

The exhibition will move to Knowsley’s Kirby Gallery from 17th September until 26th January 2019. New works will be created for the Kirkby Gallery show, while some of the works from the Liverpool show will travel to Sarno in southern Italy as part of the SettembreLibri festival. The exhibition moves to the Bower Ashton Library at UWE in February 2019.

 

 

Book artists from around the world have responded with a hugely creative range of ideas. Some have been stimulated by the themes in the book; others have been inspired by the way the story is told; others have made links between Frankenstein and other classic stories such as Dracula and The Golem. Some of the works have been made in small editions; some are unique works. Many of them are available to buy.

Liverpool Central Library will also be the venue for the fifth Liverpool Artists’ Book Fair, taking place on Saturday 7th & Sunday 8th July 2018. The Fair showcases unique hand-made books, notebooks and cards, bookbinding, book sculptures and everything in between.

The iconic Liverpool Central Library is located in the heart of the city centre, on William Brown Street, between the Walker Art Gallery and the World Museum – and just a few hundred metres from Liverpool Lime Street train station.

The Exhibition and the Fair are both FREE to the public. There will also be demonstrations, workshops, talks and performances during the course of the exhibition and the fair. For more information, see LiverpoolBookArt on Facebook and http://liverpoolbookart.com

 

Redesigning the Medieval Book

Bower Ashton Library, UWE Bristol. Until Friday 29th June 2018

Books outlive people, and through them the conversation of past and present stays open. We just need to keep reading and looking closely. To open the books of the past is not to be cowed by them; it is to start that conversation. Professor Daniel Wakelin

In December 2017 the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford opened Designing English, an exhibition of its medieval manuscripts – books made, copied and illustrated entirely by hand from the 800s to the early 1500s. To accompany it, the curator, Daniel Wakelin, the Jeremy Griffiths Professor of Medieval English Palaeography at Oxford, invited contemporary artists to take inspiration from these olde bokes. Forty artists, working in media from embroidery to video, attended workshops in Oxford last spring to see and handle medieval books. They and others received a design brief with a portfolio of images of those books, and with excerpts of medieval manuscripts. In response, fifty-six artists made new books – or alternatives to books – inspired by what they saw, for a competition and display in the Bodleian Library. There is now an opportunity to see an extended version of this exhibition at Bower Ashton Library from 19th April – 29th June 2018.

Bower Ashton Library, UWE Bristol, City Campus at Bower Ashton, Kennel Lodge Road, Bristol BS3 2JT. http://www.bookarts.uwe.ac.uk/bodleian/

 

 Joseph J Field – Life Stories Project Exhibition at Dorset County Hospital, Dorchester.

Until 22nd June 2018 

The book arts work in this exhibition developed from my volunteering as an artist mainly on the Stroke Ward of the hospital in Dorchester. A few months after I began my volunteering I researched the value of reminiscence therapy for dementia patients and more generally, how exchanging “life stories” can build empathy between individuals.

 

This led to collecting stories from patients as I engaged them in simple hand printing using rubber stamping and offset techniques. I invited some of the patients to give me a story for the book arts project – to tell me something about their lives. Often their focus was on their childhood memories.

I have constructed books around the stories and made unique exhibition pieces which contain contextual material – old postcards, military badges, maps etc. The exhibition will also include mixed media framed work on the theme of “memories” and a series of drypoint portraits of men and women in their 70’s, 80’s and 90’s.

The exhibition corridor provides a perfect space for temporary exhibitions with good lighting and professional display and a footfall of tens of thousands. http://www.fieldfinearts.co.uk

Exhibition Corridor, Level 2, Dorset County Hospital, Dorchester. Arts in Hospital, Dorchester: http://www.dchft.nhs.uk/about/arts/Pages/default.aspx

 

 The Curious World of Artists Books featuring The Whiteness Exhibition at

Blickling Hall Loft Galleries, Norfolk. Monday 30th April to Sunday 27th May 2018

In association with ‘Trust New Art’ and ‘The Word Defiant’ 1st May to 28th October 2018.

Books are the main theme this summer at the magnificent National Trust building Blickling Hall, Norfolk, which will be featuring two book art exhibitions as part of its larger installation for the Trust New Art programme.

Blickling’s library, one of the most impressive and significant house libraries in the care of the National Trust will house ‘The Word Defiant’ an immersive theatrical book art and sound installation by award winning theatre company Les Enfants Terribles. The installation will enable visitors to explore the importance of books, the threat posed to them around the globe and their shifting role and continued relevance in a changing world.

A series of installations around the house and out in the garden Temple will tell the story of books that once held significance but now find themselves superseded by modern technology, those that have been banned, neglected or have become symbolic.

Running alongside the installations ‘The Curious World of Artists’ Books’ curated by Jules Allen, brings together the work of twenty UK and International book artists using a variety of forms, including altered and sculptural books, pop-ups, concertina’s, fine bindings and new site-specific works and also featuring the ‘Whiteness’ exhibition on loan from the collection of Robert Bolick. The work selected by Allen as part of her ongoing research into the use and symbolism of colour through the medium of artists’ books, explores the emotional and spiritual connotations inherent within this, the purest colour in the spectrum.

To celebrate the ethos of the exhibitions there will be a Demonstration Weekend on Saturday 5th & Sunday 6th May showcasing the traditional techniques of Printmaking, Bookbinding and Letterpress by volunteers from the John Jarrold Printing Museum and the Society of Bookbinders.

Blickling Hall Loft Galleries, Norfolk, NR11 6NF. For further information please see:

https://www.facebook.com/blicklingLoftgallery/

https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/blickling-estate

 

Events and artists’ book fairs

 Oxford Guild of Printers Awards

One of the two Oxford Guild of Printers awards at the recent Oxford Fine Press Book Fair went to Rachel Marsh of Semple Press for the book Pandæmonium.

Pandæmonium is letterpress printed using wood Æ ligatures and metal centaur type, on 180gsm Fedrigoni Materica (acid free). The boards are 1.5mm millboard, covered in hahnemuhle bugra butten. Read more about the project at: http://www.semplepress.co.uk/#/pandaemonium/

 turn the page – Artist’s Book Symposium and Fair at The Forum, Norwich.

Symposium – Thursday 24th May 2018

Artist’s book fair – Friday 25th – Saturday 26th May 2018

Keynote Speakers for the symposium are Tom Sowden and Rosie Sherwood. Presentations by: Siobhan Britton, Angie Butler, Noriko Suzuki-Bosco, Gemma Meek, Belinda Mitchell, Lydia Denno, Jane Craddock Watson, Katie Jones Barlow. For the full line-up of speakers and to register online visit: https://www.turnthepage.org.uk/symposium

 

For exhibitor information and events at the artist’s book fair – Friday 25th – Saturday 26th May 2018, see: https://www.turnthepage.org.uk/the-fair

 

Shipley Wayzgoose will take place on Saturday 9th June 2018 at The Kirgate Centre, Shipley. Organised by Papercut Bindery & The Print Project. http://www.theprintproject.co.uk/shipley-wayzgoose-2018/

 

 Internet news

Booknesses

This website is a definitive record of the diverse events which made up the Booknesses Project, hosted by the Department of Visual Art (DoVA), Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture (FADA) at the University of Johannesburg (UJ), South Africa, from 21 – 26 March 2017. You can access all of the archive from this event online on the new website which launched in March 2018 on the anniversary of the event: http://www.theartistsbook.org.za/view.asp?pg=booknesses

 Joachim Schmid has a new website: http://www.lumpenfotografie.de

This merges the former schmid.wordpress.com & schmidbooks.wordpress.com and incorporates a shop where you can purchase copies of his books: http://www.lumpenfotografie.de/shop/

 

New Artists’ Publications

Liver & Lights No. 56 and 57, One Shoe Michael, a London song cycle.

John Bently

For the last year I have been working on a cycle of interrelated texts/songs/lyrics that relate to the life of the mythical One Shoe Mickey, a former refugee who has somehow found his way to London.

‘Mickey’ is what the people of London call him, although he has had many names, and has existed throughout history. Like in all the best superhero adventures, Michael has taken a bang on the head and this has cleared his senses. Now he sees the world for what it really is: a bloody mess.

In his mixed-up brain he thinks that shoes should only be worn one at a time, because there is only one god. He also thinks that gloves are significant; they must be – he sees so many of them dropped on the London street. Mickey believes that they are the souls of all the sons, daughters, wives, mothers, nephews, lovers, friends and kind strangers etc. lost on all the long and desperate roads emanating from the war that never ends.

Mickey thinks he can somehow reunite them all, mend them all, all the lost and broken things of the world. It is said that he collects all the broken snails up from the London pavements on rainy days and glues them back together. Among the gloves he seeks the One True G’love, a mythical glove that may or may not relate to his own lost family…

More information and purchase link at: http://liverandlights.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/liver-lights-no-56-and-57.html

 

 THE DESIRE FOR HAIKU: READING ROLAND BARTHES. THE PREPARATION OF THE NOVEL. Emma Bolland, Helen Clarke, Louise Finney, Sharon Kivland, Debbie Michaels, Bernadette O’Toole, Rachel Smith. 

Published by MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE. 

 

“For two years we have been reading The Preparation of the Novel by Roland Barthes, the collection of the series of lectures he gave at the Collège de France between 1978 and 1980, completed shortly before his death in 1981. He declared his intention to write a novel, and in this pedagogical experiment, explores the trial of novel writing. This year we are reading his lectures on his favourite literary form, the haiku, a poem of seventeen syllables in three lines of five, seven, five, usually containing a seasonal reference. He confronts the problem of how to pass from Notation (of the Present), ‘a short fragmented form’, to the Novel, ‘a long continuous form’. For Barthes, the haiku is an ‘exemplary form of the Notation of the Present’, ‘a minimal act of enunciation’ that ‘notes […] a tiny element of “real”, present, concomitant life’. Our haikus are Barthes’s haikus, or rather, our haikus are constructed only of his words, extracted from the chapter entitled ‘The Desire for Haiku’, one from (or even for) each page. It is an experiment in writing, if not a search for a form (for that is given), drawn from our more or less monthly meetings during the academic year around a table to talk about writing, the trial of writing, one that may show the rhythm of our reading.”

ISBN 978-1-910055-45-8. 12 pages, 205 x 140 mm. Format: stapled/sewn pamphlet

£3.00, with free post & packing. MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE FROM: http://lightsculpture.pagesperso-orange.fr/sharon/publications.html

 

 Browsing History

Christodoulos Makris

My poetry object Browsing History, a 16-postcard set in snug cellophane, is out now on zimZalla avant objects, a Manchester-based publishing project releasing literary objects.

Browsing History documents my output as Digital Poet in Residence at the 2017 edition of StAnza, Scotland’s International Poetry Festival taking place in St Andrews. Released on the first anniversary of the start of my residency, it represents object 046 on the zimZalla list.

To view a free sample, and to order a copy, visit: https://zimzalla.co.uk/046-2/

Jaipur, Delhi, and Agra 

New artists’ books by Daniel Lehan

Jaipur, Delhi, and Agra – three Riso printed artists’ books are now in the Portfolio and Shop sections at: http://www.daniel-lehan-books.co.uk

Each of these books is stab bound with a sheet of glassine separating each page. Jaipur, Delhi, and Agra were recently launched at bookartbookshop with an exhibition of collaged postcards.

Agra & Fatehpur Sikri is significantly larger than the book of post cards which I bought on eBay and that I collaged with texts cut out from an illustrated guide to Agra, also from eBay. Agra & Fatehpur Sikri, along with Jaipur, and Dehli – Old & New, is part of a series of three India themed Riso printed books. 17.5 x 27.5 cm, 20 pages, stab bound with glassine inserts, 2018. £30. http://www.daniel-lehan-books.co.uk

 Round About Town
Kevin Boniface 

Published by Uniformbooks
“I see the waxwings again. This time they are in the tree by the flats where the skinny Asian man with the grey jeans and studded belt is trying to gain access by shouting Raymond.”
– Sunday, 23 January 2011

For the last eight years Kevin Boniface has been writing succinct descriptions of events and incidents that have taken place whilst out and about on his postal round, his daily route taking him from the main sorting office to the streets and outlying neighbourhoods above the town. In these commentaries and records nothing seems to be typical—engaged and disconnected conversations, the observed and the overheard—the everyday activity of life on the move.

With 58 black and white photographs. March 2018, 128pp, 234 x 142, paperback with flaps, ISBN 978 1 910010 18 1. £12.00. Free postage in the UK.
Further details and to order direct: http://www.colinsackett.co.uk/roundabouttown.php

 M1

Ricky Adam

Published by Audit

‘This motorway starts a new era in road travel. It is in keeping with the bold new scientific age in which we live.’ Ernest Marples

‘A travelogue narrated through bodily effluent. A motorway journey described in the call and response of the full bladder. A British road movie – Two Lane Blacktop and Wild At Heart reduced to a trail of piss-filled plastic bottles’.

 

Book details: 20 photographs: Discarded bottles of urine. M1 Motorway UK. 2015 – 2017. 56pp / 320 x 240 mm. Litho 4-colour process. Embossed cover title. Fold out 8 page softcover. Open spine – Swiss binding. Matt coated art paper. LTD edition of 300. Published by Audit. ISBN 978-1-5272-1788-1. £20. Book available from: http://audit.bigcartel.com/product/m1-1

 

Sarah Bodman

Centre for Fine Print Research, University of the West of England