My favoured form of working over the last seven years or so has been that of the artists' book. After various entanglements of sequential text and image I found it a relief that I could put all of the things I wanted to do inside covers and call the thing a book.
Books are where I can house all of the things that come to me in the process of creating them, and the book form itself poses questions that I'm keen to answer in some way in my present and future work.
I can see correspondences in the processes of creating and editing my books which point towards linear narrative structures, but I'm always finding new artefacts in the process that lead off towards more obscure routes. What am I to make of these? To layer responses and present them like exhibits for study? Or to crystallise a single notion and pretend that it stands alone? I'm undecided.
The progress I make in creating a book is sometimes linear (I'll work from page to page) and sometimes not, as the unexpected in word or image reinforces some aspect that haunts the work.
In the library where I work I'm exposed to a city functioning in the same way. The records kept in its libraries are in many ways the city's memories. As the records are exposed, they form new combinations and coherences.
The images of the ancientness of the place reduce all human activities to habitation, human lives to the indigenous character of the place.
The constant surfacing of images from the past into the present haunts the city's identity with possibilities and secrets. My recent work has attempted to come to terms with some aspect of this activity.
andreweason@hotmail.com
www.andreweason.com
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