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Book Arts |
From Autumn 2022, each new issue of The Blue Notebook is available as a free pdf download from our website. Printed copies can be ordered from Peecho. We have physical copies left of Vol 15 and Vol 16 which can be ordered via the button link on the page.
Volume 17 No 1, Autumn – Winter 2022 includes:
ZIENZUCHT – 40 YEARS OF WORK IN 1 DAY. Reflecting on a retrospective exhibition of artists’ books and prints made by Frans Baake the Dutch book artist earlier this year: In the summer of 2021, I made a decision to exhibit all the works I have made over a period of 40 years in a space somewhere in Enschede, The Netherlands.
Article insert: Agency of Error in Post – digital Print – A User Guide by artist Laura Rosser. My artistic practice concentrates on creative use of error within the context of post-digital printmaking. My practice connects me to the errors themselves, by working with an intermix of analogue and digital print technologies, exhibitions and workshops.
Rachel Marsh writes a reflective essay; “Of such will this room tell”- A residency at the Cabin, Bucks Mills, UK. The Cabin is the former summer home of two talented artists, Mary Stella Edwards and Judith Ackland.
Jane Hyslop and Lucy Roscoe introduce Bumperzine, a continuing exploration of collaborative publishing undertaken since 2018 by participants in the event Bookmarks, an Artist’s Book and Zine Fair, held at Edinburgh College of Art (ECA).
Download your free copy here.
Image: Detail from the cover design for Vol 17 No 1 by Rachel Marsh.
For World Book Night 2023, WBN United Artists invite you to read one or both of the following books and consider how you 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
Granary Books, New York City, 2001, ISBN 978-1-88712-348-8 (other editions available)
I Remember (Je me souviens) by Georges Perec
Philip Terry (Translator), David R. Godine, New Hampshire, 2014, ISBN 978-1-56792-517-3
(other editions available)
Our memories give us our personalities but we don’t seem to hold all memories in an instantly reachable database, often needing something to jog memories – smell, sights, sounds, touch and taste (Proust). Memories can be helped to flood up, and a chain of associations unstoppered, a recall from memory forgotten.
So, we would like to receive from you, a memory, to be part of the collaborative World Book Night 2023 exhibition, a combination of memories to document ourselves and our past, and perhaps our future. Using the constraint of something that no longer exists except in memory may jog memories for each other.
Submissions are open now. Your contribution can be text or image, digital or physical, 2 or 3-dimensional. Please download the pdf of the call here and read the full instructions before sending anything in. Deadline for submissions 1st March 2023, early submissions welcome.
Image: Detail from the artist’s book The Night Diana Died/I Remember A Time (Princess) by Roelof Bakker, Negative Press.
SAVE THE DATE: Thursday 30th March 2023 – Printmaking, Artists’ books, Landscape and Nature
LAND2 & Book Arts at the CFPR, UWE Bristol invite you to save the date for a one-day public event on Thursday 30th March 2023: Printmaking, artists’ books, landscape and nature.
This free, one-day event will explore environmental themes including but not limited to water quality, land degradation, pollution and damage to the landscape, interventions and ideas. The event will share some of the outcomes from UWE’s HAS-ACE Connecting Research Project Grant Scheme – Slow Violence and River Abuse: The Hidden Effect of Land Use on Water Quality – alongside curated presentations from national artists, geographers, writers, environmentalists and scientists.
Our aim is to bring together internal and external artists and LAND2 members to talk about some of these issues along with specialists and commentators from other fields.
The event will consist of short talks, group discussions, a pop-up handling exhibition of prints and artists’ books.
Venue: Performance Space, The Station, Silver Street, Bristol, BS1 2AG.
Date and Time: Thursday 30th March 2023, 11am – 3.30pm (doors open 10am, close 4pm).
Places can be booked via Eventbrite.
For more info please contact Sarah at: Sarah.Bodman@uwe.ac.uk.
Image credit: Detail from SEMAFORO VOLCANICO MMXIX, Ireri Topete, from the collection at the CFPR archive.
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 is on display at Special Collections and Archives, Cardiff University, Wales, until the end of January 2023. The project was part of the Design and Architecture Festival in Istanbul at the end of October 2022 and featured in the Turkish daily newspaper Milliyet. Posters are now installed at the Collins Memorial Library of the University of Puget Sound, Washington, USA until 14th January 2023.
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 will continue in 2023 to Essex, Washington State and Sydney, completing return journeys for the postcards and their messages.
Image: Detail of postcard, ‘Quatre-Cantons’ by Heleen de Vaan (the Netherlands)
Congratulations to:
MAMDP alum Paul Cooke, whose zine Houseplants In Horror Films published under his Dubious Books imprint, was shortlisted in the Best Fanzine category of 2022 for the Broken Pencil magazine’s annual zine awards.
MAMDP alum Kate Bernstein who has had five of her beautiful artists’ books acquired by Trinity College Library, Cambridge and the Bodleian Library, Oxford this month.
MAMDP alumni showing works produced for the project ‘The World is Handkerchief’ at the Coral Gables Museum in Florida, opening on 23rd January 2023. A wandering genealogy of handkerchiefs portraying notions of Home, displacement & belonging, curated and organised by Cecilia Mandrile and Claudia Demonte. See some of the works and exhibition displays on Instagram.
Image: Detail Houseplants In Horror Films by Paul Cooke, Dubious Books.
Rachel Smith is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans drawing, photography, writing, book arts, and performance. Her work meanders through existing texts, fragmenting narratives, appropriating text, using association, error, and distraction to visualise how sense might be sought, rejected, and re-fused. Rachel Smith is showing works from her new book in the exhibition cases here at Bower Ashton Library from 7th December – 31st January.
This work was produced while reading the short story of ‘The Library of Babel’ by Jorge Luis Borges. His imagined library is a metaphor for the universe, a rhizomatic structure without a centre or an outside, with an infinite number of interconnected hexagonal rooms. The library shelves are believed to contain every book ever written or that may ever be written, in every conceivable language. All the books appear to be unreadable provoking people to search for rooms containing readable books. It is said humans spend their lives in search of such books, and ‘perhaps the catalogue of catalogues’.
Rachel Smith will zoom in to talk about the works in this exhibition for ABC members on Weds 7th December 2022 at Bower Ashton.
You can read more about Rachel’s exhibition here at Bower Ashton Library here.
Image: Detail from Promise the Infinite: Drawing out Babel by Rachel Smith.
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 2021 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 talks about her practice and letterpress printing. Leonie Bradley and Catherine Cartwright give a talk on collaborative artists’ books and collage. LAN2D and ABC event artists’ books, prints and nature – Bristol. Angie Butler talks about her practice with artists’ books. 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 and Letterpress. 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 Fractured Light: An Anthology, by Victoria Kaye.
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. An exhibition in early 2023 is being organised by Beau Beausoleil, Farah Dailami and Yahya Zaloom at P21 Gallery in London, UK.
The image shown here is a detail from Date Due: A Library Book from Detroit to Baghdad by Toby Millman, Kathleen Rashid, Elizabeth Sutton, USA, 2012. You can read more about the Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here project on the LAAF Festival website.
