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Transmission As part of our AHRC funded project: What will be the canon for the artist’s book in the 21st Century? The Centre for Fine Print Research has invited E.F. Stevens, an artist living and working in Boulder, Colorado, USA to produce a phone-based piece this winter, as a series of short, text pieces to create an artist’s book in five instalments. Her practice includes artists’ books, installation, video and phone text-based works, and she has recently contributed an artist’s page to The Blue Notebook which also announced this new piece. If you would like to receive her free bookwork via your mobile phone (this will be sent through a free Internet service, so you will not be charged to receive the messages) then please email her to register with: your name, country, mobile/cell phone number and network provider at stevensef@googlemail.com As not all network providers can receive this type of text message (especially in the USA - if your network provider cannot be catered for, Stevens can send you the same set of text installments by email instead. As part of the AHRC project we will also be reporting this autumn on Frankfurt book fair and publishing some longer interviews from Polish artists and curators on the project website |
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| The Blue Notebook
Volume 3 No. 1 is at the printers, and will be sent out to subscribers in October. This issue includes: Robyn Sassen considers the apartheid army as an unexpected incubator for artists’ books in South Africa; Dr Anne Hammond examines non-narrative sequence in photographic books; Your Turn: experiments in narrative and play is co-written by Patricia Allmer, Jonathan Carson, Rosie Miller and John Sears, exploring the book as a site for game-playing and storytelling; Kyoko Tachibana writes about the current state of book arts in Japan, where graphic design is prevalent, and artists’ books are often considered to be “designed” by artists; Danny Flynn shares his experiments with laser cutting acrylic to replace wood and metal type for letterpress print; and Tate Shaw’s Enfolded by Holes, considers the implications of our relationship with the open book. Artists’ pages by: David Faithfull, Nick Thurston, Sandy Christie, Baysan Yüksel, E F Stevens, seekers of lice and Carson & Miller. Cover, sticker and badge design by Beth White, with illustrations by Penny White. |
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Bristol Artist's Book Event at
Saturday 4th April and Sunday 5th April 2009
10am - 5pm both days
Arnolfini, in collaboration with The Centre for Fine Print Research at the University of the West of England, Bristol, is pleased to announce the second Bristol Artist's Book Fair at Arnolfini.
This will take place on 4th and 5th April 2009 on the ground floors of Arnolfini. The booking fee of £80.00 per stand for the weekend is for a table (+2 chairs). Arnolfini and the CFPR will publicise the event nationally and locally.
Arnolfini is one of Europe’s leading centres for the contemporary arts. Re-opened in September 2005 after re-development and expansion, Arnolfini has one of the best arts bookshops in the country and a stylish, lively café bar. This will be a great opportunity to show work to a new audience and meet with other artists and publishers.
There are a limited number of stands, so early booking is advised. If you would like to share a stand please supply one contact address and up to two artist or press names per stand for any publicity material. The booking form is attached below. We will supply details of accommodation, directions and parking on receipt of booking form and payment.
There will also be a free 'book surgery' and events running over the weekend.
We hope you can make it and look forward to seeing you!
For more info or booking forms email : Sarah.Bodman@uwe.ac.uk
AHRC Project Update: What will be the canon for the artist’s book in the 21st Century?
Thanks to all our survey respondents so far. We have received some very interesting responses, and some beautiful ABTREE diagrams already which will be used for the exhibition wall in the New Wave artists’ books show in September 2009. The survey is online for another year and we look forward to hearing more views (http://www.bookarts.uwe.ac.uk/asurvey08.htm).
We spent an intensive week in Poland for the project at the end of June, interviewing artists, gallerists, press and museum curators. We will be writing up these interviews as case studies over the summer and will also upload some audio files from the discussions. Our journey through Poland started in Kraków, moved to Kielce and Bodzentyn where we interviewed the writer and artist Radoslaw Nowakowski about his own books and the development of artists’ books over the last 20 years in Poland. The interview took place in Nowakowski’s home in the hamlet of Dabrowa Dolna near Kielce, where many of his books are based. Our visit coincided strawberry season, so we were treated to lots of local strawberry dishes by the interviewees during our stay.
We then moved on to Lódz, with Radoslaw Nowakowski kindly accompanying us as our translator, to interview the wonderful Janusz Pawel Tryzno and Jadwiga Tryzno, who founded and run the Book Art Museum with their son Pawel. This is an amazing institution which has been publishing artists’ books and fine press works for 28 years, and which houses a working press studio and bindery, full of rescued machinery which is all maintained and used to produce editions. Between them the Tryzno’s combine the practice of traditional and modern methods of production for artists’ books, curate exhibitions, promote and teach book arts to a wide audience and maintain the museum collection. After Lódz we travelled by train to Warsawa from Kielce to spend a day with Alicja Slowikowska (curator of numerous artists’ books exhibitions and founder of http://bookart.pl/ and Joanna Stokowska (paper artist) who kindly translated our conversations, at the Biblioteka Narodowa where Slowikowska has her office.
We then moved on to Poznan to meet with Tomasz Wilmanski and Joanna Adamczewska. Wilmanski is the founder of Galeria AT, in Poznan, which concentrates on text-based work, concrete poetry, experimental books, sound books and performance. Wilmanski has curated and shown these works there since 1982, and in 1990 started a series of exhibitions called ‘Book and What Next’, containing artists' books, concrete and visual poetry. To date there have been seven of these shows including artists such as Emmett Williams, Malgorzata Gryglicka, Joanna Adamczewska, Joanna Hoffmann, Adam Witkowski and Bernard Heidsieck.
Joanna Adamczewska is an artist who mainly works with experimental books; concerned with how music, sound and vision can come together within the artist’s book. Since the late 1980’s Adamczewska has been working on ‘Acoustic Books’, a series of unique books produced to create different sounds as they are opened and performed in front of an audience. Adamczewska kindly showed us a film of the performance and talked us through each of these inspirational books.
We are very grateful to all the participants in our interviews in Poland - for their hospitality, generosity of information, willingness to share their history and ideas and the wonderful welcome we received at each venue.
Bookmarks VI
We are currently scanning and compiling the artists’ bookmarks sets for Bookmarks VI which involves 5,000 works by 50 artists. The Bookmarks VI website and 10 distribution venues in Europe and the USA will launch on 15th September. Lauren Curl, who has just graduated from Cardiff School of Art & Design, UWIC - with a 1st Class Honours in Fine Art, is interning in July to help with the Bookmarks project. Thanks also to Rebecca Sully for a day’s help with Bookmarks stamping in June.
The Blue Notebook
We are also working on the next issue of The Blue Notebook which will be published early October, and includes contributions by: Kyoko Tachibana, Dr Anne Hammond, Tate Shaw, Robyn Sassen, Jonathan Carson and Rosie Miller, Tom Trusky, Brad Freeman and Danny Flynn. Artists' pages by Baysan Yuksel, Sandy Christie, David Faithfull, Jonathan Carson and Rosie Miller, seekers of lice, and E.F. Stevens. Cover, badge and sticker design by Beth White. Please see our publications pages for subscription details.
Angela Gardner Visit
The poet and artist Angela Gardner visited CFPR last month as part of her Churchill Fellowship award to travel to the USA and UK investigating options for establishing a collaborative print/poetry small press for emerging practitioners in Australia.
Her recently launched press light-trap will publish collaborations between poets and artist printmakers in Australia.
'Books That Fly' Talk
Sarah gave a talk at the “Books That Fly” Conference at the University of Brighton on 5th July 2008. You can download The quiet democracy of the contemporary artist’s book (or why do artists make books?) from the Books That Fly link on the exhibitions and events page.
Summer CPD Book Arts Courses.
All of our courses are fully booked for the summer; we will be running more one-day classes later in the Autumn.
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