Mapping
Place: Architectural Book Structures
These texts and images catalogue a body of work produced as an investigation of relationships between the geographical location of built architectural environments and cultural production using book structures.
The direct experience of a specific place in the artist's memory is a collective layering of incident and the fleeting moment. This is made poignant by an emotive response influenced by sight, sound, touch and smell.
The actual location of a particular building within the artist's experience has variable contexts, given the transient nature of journeys between the building and elsewhere. A governing time based book structure immediately has implications of past histories, the here and now of the present and a projected prognosis for the future.
A series of artists' books have been made using the printed image and texts. These books form a conclusion and meeting point between the different facets of a cross/multi-disciplinary practice. They are informed by plinth based sculptural book works and video works installed as projections. Using the combination of these three areas of practice the artist has endeavoured to challenge and redefine the parameters of the book, through interpretations of the man-made geography of the city and the inside and outside of its public and domestic architectural structures.
Mapping the Public Space
The process of reading the map prompts intimate recognition, making place quantifiable by recalling it through personal memory. Maps have an intertextual dimension where meaning can cross boundaries of place. As a starting point the artist began with a mapping process, concentrating on areas within the locality of the city centre. A public space then branched out on detours to a domestic environment in another part of the city.
Literally and conceptually the place became a matrix, as these maps were transformed into three-dimensional representations; through the process of printmaking, routering, sandblasting and casting in paper, plaster and lead. These map casts have the irregular edge or perimeters of the found fragment or shard. This characteristic serves to emphasise the lack of a frame, where meaning runs off the edge into a void where anything can happen: mirroring the self containment of cities and the often collective view of their inhabitants of an abstract space that lies beyond.
Referencing the found artefact, the cast map alludes to the revealing of historical layers inherent within the city. Researching the archives to investigate the nature of archaeological excavation in the city, the artist examined the way histories are interpreted and constructed, in an attempt to define the notion of time and place, both real and imagined.
Books and Buildings as Repositories
Using traditional bindery materials, the plaster and lead casts of maps, text blocks and architectural details, the artist made a number of small, intimate, unique works. These sculptural book objects are presented as artefacts that parody and examine parallels between both architectural and book structures. As artefacts, they have been resourced digitally as material for the final series of printed artists' books.
Research for these works included the writing of pared down texts, describing direct experience of interiors and exteriors of public buildings and rooms in a domestic dimension. Appropriate texts on architectural theory were examined and both types of texts have been edited and prepared as narrative for the concluding series of printed artists' books.
The House: The Domestic Space
After writing the texts describing an experience of the rooms in the house, the artist then treated them as an inventory to prepare moulds and make casts of architectural details. This collection of casts presents the possibility to make the physical private realities of the house public. The casts have been digitally documented, using scans and stills and then resourced for the series of printed artists' books.
The Moving Image: A Filmic Book Format
The video shorts have been made to be shown as autonomous projected works. Contemporary footage of the specific places has been intercut with footage traditional notions of that particular landscape: through archive documentary film and photographs, and historical, figurative, genre painting; evoking the passage of time in relation to the geographical space.
The video works are constructed using non-linear editing. Compositionally, they explore the book format utilising text, mimicking the page and placing sound as a structural device between image and text. Both books and the moving image are time-based; a moving image may be activated through the simple device of a flip book.
In video works, as in the actual book, a process of re-reading or re-viewing a passage (of time) becomes possible through the use of repetition in editing. Traditional notions of landscape are challenged as the fields of sound and image trace the activated mechanism of the book.
References
Harbison, R. Eccentric Spaces, Avon Books, New York, 1977
Drucker, J. The Public Life of Artists' Books: Questions of Identity, from The Journal of Artists' Books, published in The Artists' Book Yearbook 1996-97, Magpie Press, London, 1997, pp 40-43
Bachelard, G. The Poetics Of Space, Beacon Press, Boston, 1994
Casey, E. S. Getting Back Into Place, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1993
Smith, K. A. The Structure Of The Visual Book (3rd ed.) Keith A. Smith Books, New York, 1994
back
These texts and images catalogue a body of work produced as an investigation of relationships between the geographical location of built architectural environments and cultural production using book structures.
The direct experience of a specific place in the artist's memory is a collective layering of incident and the fleeting moment. This is made poignant by an emotive response influenced by sight, sound, touch and smell.
The actual location of a particular building within the artist's experience has variable contexts, given the transient nature of journeys between the building and elsewhere. A governing time based book structure immediately has implications of past histories, the here and now of the present and a projected prognosis for the future.
A series of artists' books have been made using the printed image and texts. These books form a conclusion and meeting point between the different facets of a cross/multi-disciplinary practice. They are informed by plinth based sculptural book works and video works installed as projections. Using the combination of these three areas of practice the artist has endeavoured to challenge and redefine the parameters of the book, through interpretations of the man-made geography of the city and the inside and outside of its public and domestic architectural structures.
Mapping the Public Space
-
"From cities of brick to cities in books to cities
on maps is a path of increasing conceptualisation."
"For a feeling of thorough transcendence such unobvious relations between the model and representations seem essential, and the flimsy connection between acres of soil and their image on the map makes reading one an erudite act."
(Harbison 1977, p.124)
The process of reading the map prompts intimate recognition, making place quantifiable by recalling it through personal memory. Maps have an intertextual dimension where meaning can cross boundaries of place. As a starting point the artist began with a mapping process, concentrating on areas within the locality of the city centre. A public space then branched out on detours to a domestic environment in another part of the city.
Literally and conceptually the place became a matrix, as these maps were transformed into three-dimensional representations; through the process of printmaking, routering, sandblasting and casting in paper, plaster and lead. These map casts have the irregular edge or perimeters of the found fragment or shard. This characteristic serves to emphasise the lack of a frame, where meaning runs off the edge into a void where anything can happen: mirroring the self containment of cities and the often collective view of their inhabitants of an abstract space that lies beyond.
Referencing the found artefact, the cast map alludes to the revealing of historical layers inherent within the city. Researching the archives to investigate the nature of archaeological excavation in the city, the artist examined the way histories are interpreted and constructed, in an attempt to define the notion of time and place, both real and imagined.
Books and Buildings as Repositories
-
"Because the book is a loaded ideological and cultural
symbol, it plays into many possibilities for interpretive and productive
strategies."
(Drucker 1996-97, p.4)
"Within the ambience of a building, a landscape becomes articulate and begins to speak in emblematic ways."
(Casey 1993, p.32)
Using traditional bindery materials, the plaster and lead casts of maps, text blocks and architectural details, the artist made a number of small, intimate, unique works. These sculptural book objects are presented as artefacts that parody and examine parallels between both architectural and book structures. As artefacts, they have been resourced digitally as material for the final series of printed artists' books.
Research for these works included the writing of pared down texts, describing direct experience of interiors and exteriors of public buildings and rooms in a domestic dimension. Appropriate texts on architectural theory were examined and both types of texts have been edited and prepared as narrative for the concluding series of printed artists' books.
The House: The Domestic Space
-
"I must show that the house is one of the greatest
powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind.
The binding principle in this integration is the daydream. Past, present
and future give the house different dynamisms, which often interfere,
at times opposing, at others, stimulating one another."
(Bachelard 1994, p.6)
After writing the texts describing an experience of the rooms in the house, the artist then treated them as an inventory to prepare moulds and make casts of architectural details. This collection of casts presents the possibility to make the physical private realities of the house public. The casts have been digitally documented, using scans and stills and then resourced for the series of printed artists' books.
The Moving Image: A Filmic Book Format
-
"Pacing is handed to us in the cinema; it must be searched
out in the book"
(Smith 1994, p.143)
The video shorts have been made to be shown as autonomous projected works. Contemporary footage of the specific places has been intercut with footage traditional notions of that particular landscape: through archive documentary film and photographs, and historical, figurative, genre painting; evoking the passage of time in relation to the geographical space.
The video works are constructed using non-linear editing. Compositionally, they explore the book format utilising text, mimicking the page and placing sound as a structural device between image and text. Both books and the moving image are time-based; a moving image may be activated through the simple device of a flip book.
In video works, as in the actual book, a process of re-reading or re-viewing a passage (of time) becomes possible through the use of repetition in editing. Traditional notions of landscape are challenged as the fields of sound and image trace the activated mechanism of the book.
References
Harbison, R. Eccentric Spaces, Avon Books, New York, 1977
Drucker, J. The Public Life of Artists' Books: Questions of Identity, from The Journal of Artists' Books, published in The Artists' Book Yearbook 1996-97, Magpie Press, London, 1997, pp 40-43
Bachelard, G. The Poetics Of Space, Beacon Press, Boston, 1994
Casey, E. S. Getting Back Into Place, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1993
Smith, K. A. The Structure Of The Visual Book (3rd ed.) Keith A. Smith Books, New York, 1994
back