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Book Arts |
For World Book Night 2023, WBN United Artists invited people via an open call, to read one or all of the following texts, and consider how they might represent a memory that could be used to create a shared experience, a coming together of voices from the past and present.
I Remember by Joe Brainard
I Remember (Je me souviens) by Georges Perec
I Remember, I Remember by Mary Ruefle
114 contributions were sent to us from Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Mexico, Nepal, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Singapore, Sweden, UK, USA.
The exhibition is on show here at Bower Ashton Library, UWE Bristol, UK from 20th April – 30th June 2023, and Hong Kong Design Institute from late July – end of Sept 2023. The keepsake has been posted out to contributors to the project. We revealed the keepsake in a video on World Book Night Sunday 23rd April. You can view all the works received on the Instagram gallery put together by Linda Parr. Visit the main exhibition page to: watch the video, download the catalogue or listen to an audio recording made by Sylee Gore when editing the poem Four Channel Memory for the keepsake.
WBN 2023 is curated and organised by Sarah Bodman and Linda Parr. The exhibition at Hong Kong Design Institute is organised by Jessica Ho Yuk Ching.
Image: Detail from I Remember by Pang Oi Yi (Hong Kong).
Visiting artist and publisher Julie Johnstone / Essence Press and independent artists’ books specialist Maria White held a fascinating public conversation at UWE Library for Julie’s solo show: ON A CLEAR DAY – Book works and poem objects responding to Agnes Martin this month. This exhibition is on display in the main artists’ books cabinets at Bower Ashton Library, UWE Bristol until 30th June 2023.
Julie Johnstone has also curated an accompanying display of artists’ books Space, line, colour, from the library’s collection, on show in the side cabinets. Open to the public Monday – Friday 9-5. All info can be found here.
Image credit: Detail from the rose, Julie Johnstone.
Each issue of The Blue Notebook is available as a free pdf download from our website.
Volume 17 No 2, Spring – Summer 2023 includes:
Amador Perez… art… books… art books… artists’ books…
UK based Japanese artist and researcher Noriko Suzuki-Bosco reports on the Otaru Book Art Week, a book art event that has been taking place for the last 12 years in the small port town of Otaru in Hokkaido, Japan. She recounts her visits to the different venues and the artworks seen.
Un/tellable Stories. An Essay in Images and Lists by Jess Richards.
Composing in Colour and Line: An Interview with Artist and Bookbinder Timothy C. Ely by Jennie Hinchcliff, Exhibitions Manager at the San Francisco Center for the Book, USA. In the forty-plus years he has created codexes, Ely estimates that he has completed hundreds of works. The elaborate use of composition, sweeping colour palettes, cribriform writing, and dense, diagrammatic drawings are hallmarks of his work.
It’s art and it’s a book – but no art book. How artists’ books are testing the limits of libraries by Lilian Landes, curator of the collection of artists’ books at the Bavarian State Library, Germany.
Making places, making poems: process and performance in landscape book arts by Anna Reckin.
Featured cover and interior pages artist – Mark Addison Smith is a queer artist whose design specialisation is typographic storytelling: allowing illustrative text to convey a visual narrative through printed matter, artists’ books, and site installations. This issue features artworks from his new book THE STREETS ARE VERY QUIET.
Download your free copy of Vol 17 No 2 here.
Image: Detail from the cover design for Vol 17 No 2 by Mark Addison Smith.
The ABYB is a biennial reference publication focusing on international activity in the field of book arts. It serves as a resource for artists, academics, students, collectors, librarians, dealers, publishers and researchers, in fact anyone interested in artists’ books!
The 2022-2023 issue has essays and articles by: Imi Maufe; David Solo; S. Pringly Binder; Maria White; Jeff Thomas, Jennie Hinchcliff & Chad Johnson; Moritz Küng & John McDowall; Robert Bolick; Tanya Peixoto; Susan Hartigan; Stephen Clarke; Amir Brito Cadôr; Dino Alfier; Rob van Leijsen; Zine Without a Crown.
It also contains lots of useful information on: Artist’s Book Publishers & Presses; Bookshops for artists’ books; Artist’s Book Dealers; Artist’s Book Galleries & Centres; Collections, Libraries & Archives; Artist’s Book Fairs and Events; Book Arts Courses and Workshops; Design, Print & Bind; Print Studios; Journals and Magazines; New Reference Publications; Organisations, People, Projects and Societies.
There are also listings of 420+ new artists’ books that have been made recently, or will be made in 2022-2023, sent in by artists around the world.
Edited by Sarah Bodman. Published by Impact Press at The Centre for Print Research, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK. ISBN 978-1-906501-22-8. 292pp, 21 x 29.7 cm, black and white throughout, 503 illustrations. Available now. Order your copy here.
The project, organised by Linda Parr has responded to Georges Perec’s 243 imaginary postcard messages by making the missing images, then sending real postcards. There was an enthusiastic worldwide response, catching the imagination of students & professors, artists & writers, Perec scholars, translators, mathematicians and architects.
Postcards for Perec was on display at the Albert Sloman Library at the University of Essex in Colchester, UK until the middle of April 2023, the next stop is Australia. Check the Instagram link below for updates.
Georges Perec’s postcards were first published in a French magazine Le FOU parle, in 1978. Far from their description ‘en Couleurs Véritables’ (in Real Colour), they are only postcard messages, with no holiday pictures at all, and entirely in black & white. The messages were translated into English by John Sturrock, and published in 1997 by Penguin Classics, in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces.
The unnumbered messages describe hedonistic vacations of happy holidaymakers, careless about sunburn and with never a hint of the discomforts of travel, nor the bills. There are so many messages that even if you took three holidays a year it would take a lifetime to experience them all.
Images of the postcards and the exhibitions can be enjoyed on Instagram: @postcards_for_perec. The tour continues over 2023 to Washington State and Sydney, completing return journeys for the postcards and their messages.
Image: Detail of ‘Ipanema’, by Natalia Szymańska (Poland)
An exhibition: Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, organised by Beau Beausoleil, Farah Dailami and Yahya Zaloom at P21 Gallery, London, UK, will be on show from 20th April – May 2023. It includes all of the work in Shadow and Light and a curated selection of work from the letterpress broadside project, the artists’ book project (An Inventory of Al-Mutanabbi Street), the print project (Absence and Presence) and the bookmark project (Markers of Witness).
Find out more about AMSSH on the Smithsonian website; in a Guardian article; watch a video recorded at the Arab British Centre.
Image: Detail from The Iraqi Bookseller by Laurie Szujewska.
Artist’s Book Club at UWE is open to any of our students, alumni and staff.
Our sessions this year include: An invitation to make a book for our themed exhibition in July 2023 at Bower Ashton Library. Corinne Welch on her garden residency and the books made as part of that year’s work. Rachel Smith talks about her project ‘Promise the Infinite: Drawing out Babel’. Rachel Marsh on her research and letterpress printing. Leonie Bradley and Catherine Cartwright on collaborative artists’ books and collage. A LAND2 and UWE event artists’ books, prints, landscape and nature – Bristol. Angie Butler talks about her letterpress projects with Pat Randle and Steven Fowler. Victoria Kaye – visual poet and artist talks about her work including ‘Fractured Light: An Anthology’ (Poem Brut Series). Rae Holden talks about the Late Night Press. Plus a Bower Ashton summer show and tell session of books made this academic year.
A £5 membership fee helps us cover the cost of events. ABC meetings are a mix of physical and online meetings. Details of how to join in are sent out before each meeting. To join, please contact Sarah at: Sarah.Bodman@uwe.ac.uk. See the programme with meeting dates here.
Image: Detail of Late Night Press Manifesto, by Rae Holden.
This touring exhibition is part of the ongoing al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition projects. The online Inventory gallery was launched to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the bombing of al-Mutanabbi Street on 5th March 2012, for which project partners around the world held commemorative readings and events. The gallery pages show images and information for each of the 260 books completed for the project.
Exhibitions held since the launch of the tour include:
The Westminster Reference Library, Westminster, UK; The Powell Library Rotunda, UCLA, Los Angeles, California, USA; Salt & Cedar Letterpress Studio, Detroit, Michigan, USA; The Cambridge Arts Council, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA; The Santa Fe University of Art and Design, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA; The John Rylands Library, Manchester, UK; The San Francisco Center for the Book, San Francisco, California, USA; Gallery Route One, Point Reyes, California USA; the Center for Book Arts, New York in association with Alwan for the Arts, Columbia University Libraries Butler Library, International Print Center New, Poets House, New York, USA; Literary & Philosophical Society Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK; Collins Memorial Library, University of Puget Sound, Tacoma, Washington, USA; Curry College, Milton, Massachusetts, USA; American University in Cairo, Egypt; Arab – British Centre, London, UK; The Mosaic Rooms, London, UK; Kate Chappell ’83 Center for Book Arts at the University Of Southern Maine, USA; The Hague Public Library, The Netherlands; Queen Elizabeth II Library, Memorial University, St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada; Jaffe Center for Books Arts, Florida Atlantic University, USA; Central Library of Rochester and Monroe County, Rochester, New York, USA; Goddard College, Vermont, USA; Arab American National Museum, Dearborn/Detroit, Michigan, USA; Idaho Center for the Book in partnership with The Arts and Humanities Institute at Boise State University, USA; George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, USA; Herron School of Art and Design, The Herron Art Library of IUPUI University library, USA; Keats House and the Iraqi Cultural Centre, London; the Arab American National Museum, Dearborn, USA; Idaho Center for the Book in partnership with The Arts and Humanities Institute at Boise State University; Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here DC 2016 a partnership between George Mason University’s School of Art and George Mason University Libraries, Split This Rock, Smith Center for Healing and the Arts, McLean Project for the Arts, Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at The George Washington University, Busboys and Poets, Georgetown University, Cultural DC, Smithsonian Libraries, Brentwood Arts Exchange, Smithsonian American Art Museum, National Portrait Gallery, Northern Virginia Community College, George Mason University Student Media and Fourth Estate Newspaper; Rosenberg Library at the City College of San Francisco, USA; Konstlitografiska museet, Helliden, Sweden.
Selections from the related Shadow and Light project are currently on show online at UC Santa Barbara Library, California, USA. View them online here.
30 works from Shadow and Light are currently on display at the Pentacrest Museums Old Capitol Museum’s Hanson Gallery, The University of Iowa, until 27th May 2023.
The image shown here is a detail from Mutanabbi Rising by John Cutrone & Paula Marie Gourley, printed letterpress and pochoir. You can read more about the Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here project on the LAAF Festival website.
