From late 2023 to spring 2025, Sarah Bodman and Roelof Bakker undertook a mail art collaboration to produce a body of work for exhibition and an artist’s book. Together they created a place to occupy in their minds to explore creating art – a space to think and write about nature, the environment and climate collapse through physical making.

Roelof publishes his own books under his Negative Press imprint. He works across various media including collage, photography, artists’ books and writing. His projects focus on themes such as the environment and climate collapse, the queer lived experience, memory and social history.

Sarah’s work is also based in photography, collage, artists’ books – feminism – in particular the representation of women poisoners and the persecution of and depiction of women as witches, the environment and nature and now with Roelof the current ecological collapse.

Roelof Bakker and Sarah Bodman:

Our project was inspired by a statement by American writer and activist James Baldwin – ‘The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.’ We made work responding to that statement by low-fi means, cutting, gluing, posting, etc. inventing their ‘place’, interpreting that statement in three ways:

1 as a place of us to occupy in our minds together
2 as a place of us to make art together
3 as a space for us to think about the environment through our art making

We also took prompts from artist Paul Thek’s ‘Teaching Notes’, a questionnaire Thek compiled for his New York design class in the late 1970s, while also posing questions to one another to inspire our collage-making.

Scissors, glue, pencil, paint and rubber stamps were our tools; vintage postcards, original photographs, old books, newspapers and magazines our raw material. Our making approach: Re (use) Re(order) Re(purpose) Re(print) Re(interpret) Re(form) Re(frame) Re (make) Re(build) Re(cycle) Re(transform) Re(create) Re(steal) Re(write) Re(appropriate) Re(narrate) etc.

Could we make a space unique for us, a place of (visual) debate and knowledge-sharing?

To widen the collaborative spirit of the project, we invited artists/writers Rachel Smith and Declan Wiffen to respond to the collages with new writing.

This exhibition shows the original collaged artworks and postcards for the first time, along with the collaborative artist’s book which was published and launched with a reading by Roelof Bakker, Sarah Bodman, Rachel Smith and Declan Wiffen at the Small Publishers Fair in London on 24th October 2025.

I’m with the trees, we sing together.

Love nature for more than its appearance.

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Roelof Bakker is a Hastings-based artist who explores photographic processes, writes and makes books. Recent work addresses the loss of wildlife (Some Queer Animals, Negative Press, shortlisted for the Arles Prix Du Livre 2024), violence against gay men, and plastic pollution in our bodies. https://rbakker.com
@roelof_bakker

Sarah Bodman is an artist and researcher at CFPR | UWE, Bristol, UK; editor of the Artist’s Book Yearbook, Book Arts Newsletter and The Blue Notebook journal for artists’ books. Recent projects include Read With Me, created in tribute to Susan Hiller’s Sisters of Menon (Coracle Press, Gimpel Fils, 1983). @sarah.bodman

everything is so very much connected
56pp, 21 x 29.7cm, wire-o-bound. Printed on 170gsm natural recycled paper made with 100% recycled pulp (FSC Certified Recycling) by Sustainable Print Ltd, Kent, UK. Edition of 50. £22 available here.

You can listen to a podcast about the project made on World Collage Day here.

This exhibition is open to the public Monday – Friday 9am-5pm. No booking needed. The library is on the first floor of B block. Public parking on meters on main road or at Ashton Court.

For more information on Bower Ashton Library, visitor access and campus map, see the library website.

UWE Bristol, City Campus at Bower Ashton, Kennel Lodge Road, Bristol BS3 2JT.