Book art from Brazil

The seminar this week was a presentation by Edith Derdyk, a Brazilian book artist. Her website opens with photos of black threads "sewn" across the corners of a room, and her work encapsulates and builds on the physical movement of drawing lines, of this sort of sewing - moving from one place to another repeatedly - and of the repeated turning of pages. This trajectory, the line, is the poetic core and the substance of her work - she sees it as a way of building thought.

As well as showing us many slides (to show books in action takes many slides!), Edith brought along some examples of her books. This book, simply put together, contains a selection of pages from her many sketchbooks -

This square book is a compilation of photograph of power lines and telephone lines, which are everywhere in Brazil. It's printed on one long sheet of paper -
My favourite was printed on thin paper and came in two versions, silkscreened and digitally printed. Edith printed one sheet of paper over and over again, using files already on her computer. Sometimes the paper was so inky that it tore in the printer. The thickness of ink and fragility of paper in the final versions made it a wonderful object -
"If the whole sea is under the river" has signatures of four different widths, and the text area expands and compresses like waves or a tide. All the words - nouns and adjectives, no verbs (all the action is in the movement of the text) - are to do with water -
Many copies of the book were mounted in a line on the wall in a 2008 exhibition (see photos here) which also included large, overlapping piles of large sheets of paper -- making a profile of lines.

In 2007 Edith had a residency at Banff School of Arts and developed a very flexible binding for "Slipping" - each landscape-format page is sewn on separately, giving a marvellous movement -
In the 1980s she drew a children's book that required the child (or parent) to participate by cutting the pages into thirds, so they could be combined into many different stories. Currently she's involved in more children's books that require the "reader" to participate in reconfiguring a sheet of paper into a folded book with many possible variants.