'This is a book to commemorate the victims of the bomb on the book market of Baghdad 2007' (trans from the Arabic).'2011
Wilma Vissers, The Netherlands
| The title of my books is in the Arabic
language. A friend of mine translated this text: 'This
is a book to commemorate the victims of the bomb on the book market
of Baghdad 2007.' I made the books with fibre paper that was made from old clothes and paper. It has several foldout pages. I did this because I like it when a book has several different sizes of pages. It will give the viewer a surprise as they don’t know what will come next. I used a variety of drawing techniques. One of them is the old carbon copy technique. For the words of the title on the cover, I wrote with a very sharp pencil over the letters of the title text on top of a paper with red paste on it. In this way I copied the letters without printing them. The result suited me and it reminded me of the old carbon sheet copy used before there were any photocopy machines. The drawings in the book are inspired of a dream I had of the bomb exploding, but by a miracle the letters from the pages of the books escaped and flew off their books over hills and seas to find a new home. If I see a language that I cannot read, for example Arabic, the letters seem like loose signs to me, almost like drawings. So the letters in my book that escaped out of the books appear to be drawings in the sky. I am always curious about what is the point where language becomes form. The books where made when I stayed for four weeks at Ceardlann na gNoc, an artist-in-residence centre in Donegal, Ireland: It is in a very rugged landscaped dominated by the Errigal. Of course that is an influence too. One of the foldout pages is directly inspired by the Errigal.  www.clo.ie |
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