Special Collections Room, Bower Ashton Library
Victoria Bianchetti, Argentina
2nd June - 20th July 2010
An artist’s book is a journey. Where? It is a playful journey where the support is the book, where the text and the image coexist, sometimes trespassing from the two-dimensional to become an object. Both the text and the image turn into visual elements capable of generating a sensitive and innovative composition, creating a thousand and one layered stories. These stories offer a non-linear reading/ understanding, which leads to a versatile pattern of concepts and ideas that bring us back to the more basic conceptual starting point.
I believe this is the journey. To realise that after going through the pages/spaces of an artist’s book, your intimate, sensitive world is no longer the same, or it has been shifted. For this reason the artist’s book is for me a very appreciated and valued format to develop some of my ideas. It gives me a great freedom in my work and at the same time a deep sense or feeling of intimacy, as the message will be decoded by just one spectator at a time.
My work in general has to do with social issues and my artists’ books are no exception. I always try to depict my surrounding world, and things that really mean something to me. They are visual reflections, metaphors about family relationships, life, death, a sense of belonging to a group, destruction of natural resources, insecurity ingrained in the city where I live, genre-based violence.
When working with an artist’s book format I walk through different paths of creative inspiration which comes in many different ways. That is why my books can be visual poems, object books, books, box books, handmade, democratic multiples, altered books, or using P-O-D methods of editing, printing and publishing as a format that responds to a concept I am developing and not to its shape.
Edward Ruscha and Marcel Duchamp are great influences in my work, and I hold them in great admiration. This can be fully appreciated in 'Veinticinco Casillas de Seguridad' where I took as an inspiration Ruscha’s 'Twentysix Gasoline Stations'.
In relation to my method of working; I sometimes start with images and sometimes with a poem I have written. That is the case for 'De una Cierta Naturaleza Incierta' and 'Duelo de mí'. At other times objects drive me to produce work, as in 'Eutanasia', 'Natura I and Natura II' or 'Poemas Orientales, un dado y una llave'.
Working with the artist’s book is an amazing and unique experience, an opportunity to dive into the deepest side of my beliefs and convictions. These emerge through my hands in the multiplicity of shapes with the incomparable feeling of no limits, that nothing is forbidden.
Victoria Bianchetti
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