CFPR Book Arts: Latest Book Arts News: 2012

The Secrets of Metahemeralism
An artist’s book, letterpress print and video for our project in tribute to The Secret History by Donna Tartt.

The annual collaboration organised by Nancy Campbell and Sarah Bodman to produce an artist’s book in tribute to a particular novel began in early April and launched on World Book Night 23rd April 2012.

View the video and learn more about the project, book and poster

•	back to top

The Caseroom Press and Kurt Schwitters' Merz Fairy Tales
The current exhibition at Bower Ashton library is a beautiful display by The Caseroom Press collective: Irvine Peacock, Barrie Tullett and Philippa Wood.

The Caseroom Press is an independent publisher whose work explores the function and format of the book, from single limited editions to multiple copies; from poetry to prose; from the artist's book to traditional print; from stencils, to typewriters, to wood and metal type; from litho to digital.

This exhibition showcases a range of books, objects and ephemera. These range from individual pieces to wider collaborations, notably The MerzBox: a selection of works by a number of illustrators, designers, painters, poets, sculptors, students and musicians.

Find out more

•	back to top

What’s in the Box?
This project was founded and curated by Tom Sowden in 2003, to publish collections of artists’ books produced at UWE, supported and sponsored by: CFPR, UWE Bristol and Hewlett Packard.

Alice Drake - Print and Artists’ Books Projects Intern at CFPR has recently taken over What’s in the Box? and is curating the project to launch a new collection in the Summer.

Each project involves MA Printmaking students, staff and invited artists from the Artist’s Book Club; and has so far produced five boxed volumes of books by 50 artists.

Each book is digitally printed from a single, A3 folded sheet, printed and bound in uniform covers, with contents supplied by the artists.

•	back to top

The Blue Notebook Volume 6 No 2 2012
In this issue:
Jane Simon considers the book form’s juncture with photography as a place for looking differently at domestic detail. Her essay explores the effects of Anna Fox’s use of the [very] small book form upon the viewer’s mode of looking at the domestic.

Ampersand Duck in Canberra, Australia provides a showcase of letterpress printing activity in her local geographic area, in relation to the wider national and international transformation of letterpress printing from a bibliographic by-product of commercial output to an art and design genre that is gaining a new following and a new audience.

Adam Murray on ‘Preston is my Paris,’ co-founded by Murray and Robert Parkinson in June 2009. The project originally began as a photocopied zine specifically focusing on the city of Preston in the UK, but has since developed into a multi-faceted photographic archive consisting of 40 self-published works that address themes relating to everyday life and social consciousness.

Tim Mosely seeks to contribute to the emerging critical discourse on artists’ books by locating the “haptic” within the making and reading of books by artists. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their seminal text A Thousand Plateaus bind the haptic to “smooth space” within creative practices. Their theoretical framework and critical terminology of the haptic warrants an application to artist’s book practices.

A Williams proposes an argument for Artists’ Publishing as a theoretical vehicle to move toward a terminology/taxonomy reconciling artists’ books practices with new media developments and shifting attitudes to the ‘Book’ in the digital age.

Artists’ pages by: Alexandra Czinczel, Jon Dunning, Cath Fairgrieve, Nicolas Frespech and Christa Harris. Cover design: Tom Sowden

Available now. For subscriptions please visit The Blue Notebook page

•	back to top

Correspondence 9th International Book Art Festival, Poland
On show throughout May at Biblioteka Miejska, Lublin
CFPR artists, interns and MA Multi-disciplinary Printmaking students have been selected to exhibit in the touring book arts exhibition Correspondence, organised by Alicja Slowikowska founder of the Polish Book Art Project, which encourages greater appreciation of the book arts in Poland and further afield.

The theme for the 9th Book Art Project was Correspondence, a creative and wide umbrella title for the Festival. The exhibition launched in January at Plocka Art Gallery, and will be shown in galleries and libraries throughout Poland over 2012-2014, and venues abroad later in the programme. Previous tours have visited Germany, the USA, Egypt, Bulgaria, Israel, Finland, Sweden, Denmark and The Netherlands. The core of the project is the exhibition, composed of works selected in a competition or invited by the organisers. Entries were submitted for a committee to judge at the historic Book Art Museum in Lodz, Poland run by Jadwiga and Pawel Tryzno.

The CFPR affiliated artists in the exhibition are: Guy Begbie (CPD lecturer), Angie Butler (CPD lecturer and letterpress intern), Hazel Grainger (MA student and bookmarks 2011 intern), Charlotte Hall (MA student and artists’ books archive intern) Sarah Bodman and Tom Sowden. These artists were invited to show three books each as a small cross-section of the wide range of works being created by UK book artists today.

The image (right) is of Simon Goode’s book The Sun Did Shine Here.

You can view all of the books in the festival online at

http://korespondencja.bookart.pl/en/

•	back to top

CFPR Summer Institute 2012
All of our summer CPD courses are now available for online booking.

From letterpress, bookbinding and advanced bookbinding, to rubber stamp and pop-up books, digital print and laser cutting, to 3D Printing and Interactive Technologies.

Information and online booking links are on the Book Arts Courses page.

•	back to top

An Inventory of Al-Mutanabbi Street online gallery
As the artists’ books produced for the project are received, we are adding them to an archive of gallery pages which will be ongoing, up to completion at the end of 2012.

The gallery was launched to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the bombing of al-Mutanabbi Street on 5th March 2012, for which commemorative readings and events were held by project partners around the world.

View the books received to date

The image on the right is Memory of Al-Mutanabbi Street by the Belgian artist Christine Kermaire.

•	back to top

'Memory of Al-Mutanabbi Street' by the Belgian artist Christine Kermaire

Artists' Book Yearbook 2012-2013
The ABYB is available now. We had over 600 artist’s book listings from 207 national and international artists. Reference listings of: collections, libraries, archives, bookshops, galleries, centres, design print & bind, publishers, dealers, presses, studios, competitions, fairs, festivals and exhibitions, journals, reference books, organisations, societies, websites, academic projects, touring programmes and courses.

Essays include: John Bently on books and community; Earle D. Swope’s extraordinary account of how he came to be a book artist; an update on the work of the collaborative artists’ group AMBruno; a study by Eileen O’Keefe of Sarah Jacobs’ thoroughly absorbing - Drawn from the Inventory: the Notebooks of Elisabeth Faulhaber; Jackie Batey celebrates the 10th issue of Future Fantasteek!; Lawrence Upton has written on his extensive art collaboration with Guy Begbie; Davy & Kristin McGuire explain their beautiful performance piece The Icebook; Nicola Dale looks at the artistic potential of book destruction, and Radoslaw Nowakowski asks: Is a hypertext (artist’s) book possible? Linda Newington explores the book works of SALT + SHAW; Paulo Silveira reflects on the start of his recent academic project: The University and the Artist’s Book, and Reinhard Grüner shows us some of the very special presentation copies of artists’ books in his collection.

Artists’ pages by: Amir Brito Cadôr, Eric Doeringer, Lara Durback, the Idaho Book Artist’s Guild, Susan Johanknecht, Paul Laidler, SALT + SHAW, Clare Thornton and Maria White. Cover design by Tom Sowden.

254pp, 21 x 29.7 cm, paperback. £15 including UK postage, £16 worldwide, available from our publications page.

•	back to top

•	Archived news