The week started with a visit to the National Art Library at the V&A - what a wonderful place! It has 2 million items (the catalogue is online) and anyone can apply for a reader's ticket - they are free. The library is open Tues-Sat, 10-5.30; you take a seat number and order the books you want to see; they are brought to your seat.
A selection of artists books was laid out for us; here are a few. The slips of paper are the cataloguing information about each book. Gabberjab by Walter Hamady was the first book I looked at - quite thrilling to be able to page through and look at something that appears in many books-about-books only as a photo of one page spread.
This is "Poesie de mots inconnus" (1949) - mainly futurist Russian and dadaist poems in a wonderfully tactile parchment case -
"Giving fear a proper name: Detroit" (Susan kae Grant, 1984) was made in an edition of 15, each page with pins, thread winding, little 3D objects -
Ken Campbell's "Father's Garden" (1989) strikes out lines of the text in different ways to gradually reveal the story -
"Terror terror" by Ken Campbell (1977) is fridge poetry on a grand scale -
I enjoyed turning the pages of Kenneth A Smith's "Book 91", but some people got very frustrated by the way the strings resisted -
The pieced-together pages of "Aunt Sallie's Lament" (Margaret Kaufmann, 1988) can simply be turned, or can be extended - an example of paper engineering which started out as quilt designs and ended as a chair, it says here -
Next day, more project-proposal crits, along with people bringing in books they had mentioned, like Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes and "love letter no.7" that came from a Hayvend machine -
Work was put on the table, passed round, talked about -
Lots of interesting deconstruction -
I idly discovered a method of embossing using fingernails and the tubular elastic around my notebook - might be useful, simple technologies and all that...
Also this week - research practitioner lecture by sculptor Bob Pratt, who's interested in the spaces between things and what's in empty places; textile printing; and the Hidden Spaces exhibition.
This is "Poesie de mots inconnus" (1949) - mainly futurist Russian and dadaist poems in a wonderfully tactile parchment case -
"Giving fear a proper name: Detroit" (Susan kae Grant, 1984) was made in an edition of 15, each page with pins, thread winding, little 3D objects -
Ken Campbell's "Father's Garden" (1989) strikes out lines of the text in different ways to gradually reveal the story -
"Terror terror" by Ken Campbell (1977) is fridge poetry on a grand scale -
I enjoyed turning the pages of Kenneth A Smith's "Book 91", but some people got very frustrated by the way the strings resisted -
The pieced-together pages of "Aunt Sallie's Lament" (Margaret Kaufmann, 1988) can simply be turned, or can be extended - an example of paper engineering which started out as quilt designs and ended as a chair, it says here -
Next day, more project-proposal crits, along with people bringing in books they had mentioned, like Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes and "love letter no.7" that came from a Hayvend machine -
Work was put on the table, passed round, talked about -
Lots of interesting deconstruction -
I idly discovered a method of embossing using fingernails and the tubular elastic around my notebook - might be useful, simple technologies and all that...
Also this week - research practitioner lecture by sculptor Bob Pratt, who's interested in the spaces between things and what's in empty places; textile printing; and the Hidden Spaces exhibition.
That's what I love about printmaking- the negative space either as the print or as the space.
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