The University of Dundee holds one of Scotland’s leading collections of artists’ books, housed in Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design. This recording of an online event on 5 March 2024 for Dundee Women’s Festival features illustrated talks from four women artists from around the UK and beyond whose work is represented in the collection. They discuss their work and why the medium of artists’ books holds such a fascination for them.
The speakers are Egidija Ciricaite, Helen Douglas, Imi Maufe and Heather H Yeung. The event is chaired by Professor Maria Fusco, DJCAD.
Okay it looks like we’ve got a a good crowd so I think we can get going so uh good evening everybody great to have you all here for those of you that don’t know me I’m Matthew Jaren I’m the museum curator here at the University of Dundee
One of the various roles that I have uh here at the Museum collections is to look after uh the artist book collection that we have at the University um one of our most interesting collections we have nearly 1500 artist books alog together covering a huge range of uh different
Styles and forms and so on um and some of you will recall that we did a similar event to this uh it’s three years ago now extraordinarily uh and that was really successful and we’ve been looking for an excuse to do another one ever since and so we decided that dundy
Women’s Festival would be a great opportunity to um introduce you to some more of the the wonderful artists that are represented in our collections uh but I’m not going to say any more tonight because we’re delighted to have with us Professor Maria Fusco who is Professor of interdisciplinary writing
At Duncan of Jordon College of of Art and Design and indeed a creator of of artist books herself and so she’s going to be chering the event so Maria I will hand over to you thank you Matthew welcome everybody it’s lovely to see so many people here you’re all very welcome
It’s great isn’t it that we can all kind of be together remotely um so this is a special event um for Dundee women’s Festival which is an annual Festival here in dunde uh called speaking volumes women in the artist book collection at Duncan of jordanstone College of Art Char with I hear somebody
Speaking sounded quite animated um so we’ve got four speakers here here today we need to finish promptly at 7 so I’m going to try and be uh quite uh strict with my timek keeping because I really want to have time also at the end uh to
Give you an opportunity uh to ask some questions of our four fantastic speakers if um there are any questions that you have please pop them in the chat I’ll Endeavor to do my best to keep up with all the different questions s uh our speakers um will run in in the following
Order so there’ll be idia Emy Heather and then Helen and what I’m going to do is I’m going to introduce them in Purge um so I’ll begin by introducing aidia so aidia was born in Lithuania and is currently based in London pursuing an interdisciplinary PhD at the sled and
UCL Linguistics her practice is informed by her research and interest in linguistics with a particular focus on cognitive pragmatic ICS and relevance Theory most of her work is considered visual poetry marked by ethereal layers of spoken or written words it questions definite Natures of linguistic encounters and our second speaker is Emy
Who is a visual artist B based in Bergen Norway and has been working with the artist book alongside other media since 2001 in collaboration with r Randy Annie Strand and reita marberg marer excuse me she established Cod X Polaris an artist run Collective that promotes artist books in Norway and the Nordic countries
Through curating and designing exhibitions initiating collaborative projects and taking collection of bookworks to F around the world so without further Ado I’ll hand over to aidia and then Emy if you wouldn’t mind following straight on from aidia that would be lovely thank you all so much thank you very much uh Maria I’ll
Share the screen now so yes thank you Maria for introduction um um yes my name is um idia as you can see on the screen and the surname is pronounced cha but you don’t really need to know that most people know me as idia uh I’m an artist
And I do books and I’ll split this talk into two uh Parts I’m um I’m setting the timer for myself I know that there’s time keeping but I will do that and I’m I’m expecting to be on time in 10 minutes Sharp so I’ll split roughly into
Two parts I’ll I’ll do sort of more generic talk like for a couple of minutes about why I do books and uh uh why um books work for me as a medium and I’ll do the second half of I’ll talk a bit more about a specific uh uh work that I
Made so um as uh Maria has said I’m um I I work with books but my primary interest is language and I like play with and around language and what I do is often considered visual poetry and Coleridge has said that poetry is um the
Right words in the right places so I I basically I put a lot of words in in all sorts of places hoping that some of them will be in the right place and um it will work so I play with language through writing of All Sorts writing in
A very broad sense through publishing of All Sorts again in a very very broad sense research um as somebody has said um I create Worlds at the periphery of linguistic experience and which entails playing against the idea of definite nature of language uh linguistic encounter and working around those multiple layers and
Contexts of meaning that we negotiate every time we make a conversation in attempts to make sense of each other and of the world World I’ll be using um more more recent works as a backdrop to what I’m talking uh without going too much into them but if you if you have
Questions about specific works you can you can ask me um you can ask me or email me or message me um so yes I was born in konas in Lithuania but I’m based in in in London now and I am working on on um on PhD at the slate and uh
Supervised by UCL linguistics now although my primary interest is language um I most of what I do comes out in the form of books and uh why do I use book as a form uh what’s what’s in it that works better for me than for example print straightforward
2D prints or or um video work or simply writing poetry in straight lines like many people do very well um and I have been thinking about it and I think it’s the sequencing and layering and that almost cinematic experience in certain circumstances that you can achieve with the books um books
Allow me to explore the language in flux that unstable moment in language it allows a glimpse into the next and the preceding and the next and the preceding uh I often work with translucent paper semi-translucent papers Chinese Japanese papers um I have got some examples here
But I don’t want to fiddle with the with the the we screen sharing at the moment uh but the ones you can see for example the one in in the middle is Tango Kashmir which is 6 GSM paper and it is so light it is barely there uh when you
Print on it the ink is heavier than than the paper if you breathe in its vicinity it just floats up and flies away um the paper is is barely holding the text um the the ones on the sides are are type written on um on slightly
Heavier paper which is inosi and 12 GSM it is a heavy it’s much more stable paper I know the 12 GSM doesn’t really sound like paper at all all one you know printer takes 80 GSM but trust me there’s a huge difference between 12 and
And uh um and 6 GSM um so I I I I work with those layer semi-translucent layers A lot of my work is layered and it works as a metaphor for that encounter the multi-layered multicontextual unstable space of language that is always in flow um it’s like you you know
We have those photos on on iPhones and the live photos so you look at a photo and it looks like um like a snippet of the of the moment a shot of time but then you hold your finger and it changes it you see what happened before what happened after
It moves um that that’s how I see my my Works those uh moments in time that take time to exist those moments rather than Snippets of time although short ones they still take time um and I I enjoy book because it allows me to rebuild those moments um I’m not
Sure if that made sense but I hope I hope it has um so those those images that I’ve been showing now they are from my most recent Works um from latas Syria slat means bed spread in Lithuania I have been working with textile pattern from Lithuania um but that’s not what I
Want to focus on today I want to focus on something else I want to focus on on uh this book which um uh also very much centered on language but it’s um but it’s slightly older it precedes the the other books by a couple of years it’s a book that connects me
Not only to dunde University because it’s uh in uh the collections of D University collections uh but it also connects me to Maria Fusco because it was made after she she did a talk at artist books now uh event um so I I used it was made as you can see some
Time ago before covid I used to be part of the organizing committee at uh the artist books now events at the British library and and um for those who don’t know they were um who were the monthly events I can’t remember maybe B monthly events that uh
Focus on artist books uh of All Sorts um being produced uh in the country and there was a bit of showand tell and there was a bit of talking we have a couple of artists before um a discussion and a couple of artists after discussion everybody would bring their own words
Work they were hugely enjoyable and I’m not just saying because I I was um part of the of the organizing committee but I genuinely think they were they were very enjoyable and um so after those events it was not unusual to receive um an email um from somebody you
Know who were part of the event saying oh you know this this this was really lovely thank you very much and after that event um I received one of those emails and it was a slightly different one and the difference in that was the language
And this is all the list the full list of words that it contained it was a fascinating email and because Maria was talking at the event and she was talking about her writing and it made me think sort of connect though that very very complicated email those 34 words so it’s
A very short email but very complex language it made me connect that with what Maria was talking and sort of back to the email and back to the talking and um those ideas of of artist editor and curator in the in in the writing and in the in the production process um
So fascinated by the email and it was not a bad email it was very positive it’s just that the words were so abstract and so complex and so vacuous that there was nothing holding them down to to produce meaning so what I did I basically I put all those words into um
Into this randomizer um it was pre AI so we couldn’t actually replicate the speech as as we can now uh my son uh forwarded to me and I randomized the words and randomized them again and randomize them again and I came came out with this uh
This text um and the text text um I sort of I kept multiplying the text and randomizing it until well until it looked like seven pages basically because seven pages makes a good kind of essay you will agree like you know a solid essay has some pages it’s it’s not
A you know it’s not a two paragraphs so I kept randomizing and and uh sort of experimenting with a with a language and what I what what I found exciting is that this vacuous uh abstraction of words still made sense one put together because you could you
Could pretty much make anything out of it that you wanted and uh it sort of echoed back on that idea of the editor the um the editor the artist and the curator so I decomposed the email into a lot of words recomposed it into seven pages oops okay 30 seconds and I’ll be
Done um I recompose it back and I ended up with the with good sort of good good seven pages of text then I looked at how to decompose that that language further down and it the book ended up as a triptic so the first section has the essay about um literary zonal
Transitions uh the second one was the same text decomposed into uh letters and the final one was the same text decomposed into Inc specs so sort of degrees of decomposition of that same email and how it disappears um I I’m over time now uh so I’ll I’ll
I’ll round it up now um the um oh I have to say that I did marble the paper myself um but but I’m I’m I’m I’m too rubbish to to to reproduce papers that was digitally reproduced now um these um the the works that I showed at the
Beginning they’re more recent ones and uh if you are either in in China chungu or I’ll be there later this month with those works I’ll be at Bergen artist bookfest so if you’re in Norway we could you could come and have a chat and have
A look at them in person I’ll be in Malmo as well in um in sorry in Bergen in in no and Malmo in Sweden um as well so if you’re around please come and in brist in June um if you want to see this and some others um those ones in
Person I think I’m done that thank you so much little virtual clap there yes thank you g um can I invite me uh to to share screen next please right um I’m going to do a two-part talk firstly about my work and very much based on the collection that dande has
Um of my books I’ve been working like Maria said for the last 20 years focusing mainly on books that have the theme of translating travels so really how does a book can be how how a book can be used to transfer an experience especially of Journeys and then the second part I will
Talk a little bit about codex Polaris so these are a few of the books that are at dunde this one is Malik endar where I cycled to Iceland from the UK um on a 121 day cycle Journey back in 2020 and this book is a sort of flip
Book version that has 121 pages each page has one or two words from the diary that I wrote during the time and it was very much about distilling text to make a visual expression of a journey that nobody else could experience and this second one is getting lost and it’s about getting lost
On a cycle ride and was very much about um how you use the paper and the folded paper to pass on that information to the reader and it’s cut on a spir one sheet page on a spiral cut and is um yeah exactly that when anybody reads it the pages turn
Around and if we have time at the end I have a couple of these books with me that I can show how they visually um opened and this one is 36 tunnels and a ferry and this was letter press printed and I’m always very aware of how um like
The page size so the page size and how much information I need to get into the book h refers to how the page the book size ends up at the end so this is a tiny book it’s only 5 cm by 5 cm and it was a journey on a bus through
The Norwegian fjords very beautiful and I ended up distilling it down to all the signposts with the tunnels so it becomes a sort of poetic piece with the names of the tunnels and how many meters long they are and it also when it opens it forms a tunnel which you can see here
That was a nice coincidence at the end a lot of these single books that refer to Journeys have been collected into my translating travel suitcase so there are 16 different adventures in this suitcase and there I’ve also done a lot of residency projects that refer to
Journeys this is one on um the swan which is a Sailing Boat from Shetland and it was during the tour ships races that I was invited to be an artist in residence for five weeks and then had five weeks on land afterwards and I thought it was actually
Going to be a very quiet Journey little did I know about the tool ships races but at the end of the project I had a collection of two artist books several silk silk screen printed works and wooden postcards that I’d thrown out in the sea before um during the voyage and these
Were correlated into a boxed work I work a lot with boxes as well with my book works and I’m also interested about how books travel themselves so this is another residency project uh Visual Arts in the rural communities up in Northumberland where I was based for one year
And during that time I made an addition of or eight editioned books and this version the book shelf was placed in the mobile Library so people could actually take the books out and have them in their living room just as you would um loan a novel and the second version of that
Year was a suitcase version which included several other artifacts and book yeah artifacts and a journal and also the catalog for the exhibition and this box was placed on a bicycle which I cycled out of the valley visiting several cultural venues and schools on the way to Northern print in
Newcastle all of these works that I’ve been working on since 2021 have been placed in boxes which are then placed in boxes and I think a lot of this has been influenced by my studio is based in Bergen container haror so this is what I walk past every day the containers and they
Change um change every day and things come out of these boxes as well so my books have all been packed into this crate which is 80 cm x 60 cm and then this explodes into exhibition spaces this was first um curated together for Edinburgh print makers in 2018 and then expanded in 2021
At Christian S kst Hall and that’s another view from that exhibition so that’s very much about my personal work and then codex Polaris since moving to Bergen in Norway we established a book art group with Rita marog and Randy Annie strand in 2013 and I uh really to promote the
Artist book in Nordic countries which we’ve been doing through book art taking book art collections from Norway to different book art fairs around the world this is in Shanghai in 2018 and organized the Codex Nordica at codex book art fair in 20 19 where we had six stands one for
Norway Sweden Denmark Finland and Iceland and sixth stand for bibliotech Nordic and bibliotech Nordica is a collaborative project which I worked on with Megan ADI and bent chrisc where we invited artists from the Nordic countries to um produce a an addition of 11 A6 sized books to make an addition of 10 of
These libraries which I can now say one is placed in the British library and one in guttenburg University Library as well so they will soon be um available to see in different parts of the world so this ended up with 82 books in it and they have been traveling all over
The place to different book art fairs and exhibitions this is at Christian San Hall in Norway and from a book little bookshelf which is about 40 cm by 40 cm this one can also explode into a larger exhibition room and I’m really interested about how artist books take
Up space because I think we’re very used to them being small and tidy and neat but they can also yeah take up space in a room so this is bibliotech naica and the last project that um codex Polaris has been working on which was shown at Christen San Hall and
Library is K Buren unique and man foldy the artist book unique and diverse where we invite we had 600 square meter Gallery space a fantastic room so we went big and invited artists working in large scale or in um installation type works so this is Sarah Yost and Amilia TNA with two large
Scale works and these ones evisa isma and Thomas erson um Thomas ion’s here on the right which is a chain link made of books that were being thrown out by the library so we really tried to get a diverse group of u a diverse range of artworks within this
Exhibition and this is piss Pro who is a Danish group whove been producing an art catalog since the 1980s and created an installation in the exhibition space so I think from working for the last 10 years this is um one of the biggest projects that we’ve been
Working on with codex valaris and really brought together the um Nordic countries or Nordic artists working with books in a very variety of ways so I just thought I would show both my practice and this collaborative practice that has taken lot of organization but has also been a
Really good um fun and a great experience to work in thank you fantastic Emy thank you so much I give you because I’ve got my mic on I can do a clap um I’m going to um now introduce our our next two speakers uh Heather is a poet theorist and artist bookmaker
Who’s currently reader in poetry and Poetics at the University of dunde as well as visiting faculty at the Bombay Institute for critical analysis and research and a member of the artist book research Collective spinless wonders her solo and collaborative work has been shown read and performed internationally
The primary live Archive of Our artist books and poetry objects um may be found in the Scottish poetry library with subsidiary collections at the National Library of Scotland and the ABC dundy Helen Douglas is an artist based in Scotland her commitment to the book and publishing as an art practice nice
Spans 50 years publishing under the impr imprint we Productions as well as the visual arts studies Workshop Rochester Nexus press Atlanta pocketbooks Edinburgh and Tate London her books are primar are primarily visual with embodied text engaging with book structures photography and printing um to develop visual narrative and poetry
And in 2006 Helen was made life member of MAA New York in recognition of her working books so if I can invite you Heather to share your screen please you should be able to now all see with me thanks Maria I can see you so I can see
You nodding which means that if I’m running over and please start gesticulating um wildly but I will try to keep absolutely to time um thank you everybody for being here and it’s nice to see so many people that have been collected in different um in different collectives and collections um for so
Long um as Maria intimated I came to this mode of making um not primarily as an artist um but as a person who works or thinks um through poetry through a series of concerns um with how poetry objects pun fully intended the sense of a poem moving beyond a simple Voice or a
Page um and the way that this charts thoughts and expressions by material immaterial or textual textural shadowed and shadowy meemes hence most of these um and you can see um we’re being visualized you can see with me um I would probably call poetry objects um rather than artist book per se though
One finds that these taxonomize Holdings themselves very quickly give rise to questions and um objections and objectifications and interesting resistances um so resistance um objection handling speaking out exposure Erasure transparency Shadow effect gesture and inscription and speaking to the co- or Commons of communication these bookish spaces I find can give rise to
Investigations of and within all of these terms so there’s a sort of odd um communic kind of reciprocity just in the making process um and today I’d like the objects to speak object or enact for themselves so what I’d like to do is rather um rather than sort of speak more
Conceptually is to take you through a suite of these sort of um here’s your scale hand or Pam sized works and if we have time one that moves just outside of this Paradigm that chart a journey through thinking questions of space that has been my sort of um my way of
Conceptually moving through this and so thinking questions of space questions of exposure in its most negative and most positive forms um questions of the obdurat of the object and the space of communication or collecting and the variant difficulties and intr transparen of thought and the thoughts of the
Poetics of thinking so um I’m going to speak from of them to invisibilize momentarily and what I’d like to begin with now it’s a very very early work I think it might exist in the artist B collection dunde in a different form um we’ve seen some washy paper um and here
Is is the more kind of very thin um Japanese um it’s some mury Washi paper um and this is a sort of a making unmaking move um the art of epic and it’s a draft because I don’t actually have any of the fine copies anymore so pardon the scribblings the
Art of Epic Penelope’s womb weaves amphith the shuttle Rhythm unpicks sound breathing almost silently making from absence a treasured space whil in the hall men shout dogs bark and a BL BL poet sings the art rests not in what is to be done but its undoing Penelope weaves Rhythm unpicks
Sound silently making space whilst men shout a blind poet sings the art rests in its undoing unpi space things H undoing epic pacing is doing thing gra the tables CL um and more recently um foot of concerns with space disposition or arus um I will call the height of anything
That is to be taken rule the altitude without any more words that’s from Cho’s treat on the AST logical space precedes space which precedes empirical space space is noncoincident to itself space as self spatializing space has no self or limit or think self in space spatializing space think limit in space spatializing
Space or fail to think begin draw lines on milky ground body angled to skew arked by subject matter or tune thus for maintenance so says the rule asks for space and on this High what is your imprecision or determinate Mis prison think being in space is not think space
In being is not spatially correspondent or thumbing with an instrument the dark unseen one son seeks out thy old angle by the northernmost rule all and now by number obscured something is and is and do not not gordian or no or nothing we on the dark Hill of a wave draw a
Thousand unique lines to be erased principle by uncertain principle or Draw or scatter or tie a thousand lines or points and is to cut the o a gap or One A voiding space and all two safe distances all angels and a pin prick or to moons Wayne wax contain containment a
Closee keeping and the search for the dest star or non-c compossible the pace of the count of the limit I think how am I doing maybe one more um there is a bad um H with tears and tears um that I think anybody that works with paper um will enjoy far too
Much um this um this pair or a tier is a working through um in material means the question of Daphne but what I would like rather move on to is a site of Correspondence so this is a suite of um of Tears or tears um that were in fact a kind
Of it’s one of a sweet called fasal and they were a a sort of a pandemic related male art project with the artist Tim Brandon who I think is here today sort of exploring or exposing trans questions of transparency and the vectors of dialogue and the images are Tim’s um the
Tears or tears are my own as well as the words the I have eaten moss and birch bark and Willow shoot I who now crunches un Stone wonders about you what is it the hide stretches to avert how is it we have found ourselves here each as if configured behind a
Glass each reaching out of dust for a different frame when arrested we breathe through gills and indecisions still to a petrified service by movement beyond the screen yet build some strange soft Sanctuary there a tooth cracks thank you thank you heather we’re all in love with your
Little visualizer I think we’d all love one of those it’s amazing I can fully recommend it it actually folds up and it’s basically pocket sized and so I’ve used them in lecture theaters before but I didn’t know you could get one of them there’s just a very super quick question
And it’s it’s a yes or no for you Heather which is it’s from a beer and it’s a question I think it was the second book is this a paparis yes it’s it’s a mixture of mury um where she which is for GSM and and and Papyrus and um wax cotton thread and
Istrian stone lovely thank you that’s super um um Helen I believe Matthew’s operating your uh PowerPoint yes I hope so so I I’ll hand over to you thank you okay yeah H well I’m going to talk about my books moving from codex to concertina to scroll form next
Yeah the first book I I published was threads in 1974 in an addition of of 200 I was threading my thoughts um through the page these are printed um this is a a detail looking through the page next slide and then the center um you can see that the book itself was threaded
Next it was it was shown in the artist book wordss exhibition which was a traveling exhibition and I put this in because of its link I think with the dunde um book um case for exhibiting books this was a traveling exhibition which folded screens and you can see the
Box of books um so it was a very much conceived as a traveling exhibition um it was at this time that I began to um talk with t Stokes and we began a collaboration which then went on for nearly 30 years in we Productions and these are the first two book books next
Slide um what drew me to the book was it was a place where I could put my thoughts and my visual ideas and feelings um in a simple form or in a sequence um of pages and I think this cupboard in Chinese Whispers really makes that point it um the cupboard was
Made to the um proportion of the open book so the open book is as it were the cupboard and in the next slide and in the buildup to the cupboard you get the building of building the construction of the cupboard so in a sense there was a construction of the narrative and the
Construction of the book and this is what I meant by um book form next slide once the cupboard was made it became um populated by objects and this was a because there was a a desire to investigate the idea of the natural world the sparrow of life um underground
Overground and and on sorry Underground on the ground and overground so an earthquake is found roots are found this was cut if you want it opens from the the spine um the PE pods um pops open and the cabbage leaf the back and front of the page so it was using the book
Form to explore uh a visual um narrative idea of of nature next slide in moving to the countryside there was a kind of great sense of openness and and I think this accordion book made in 78 um expresses that this is like a sort of breath from the chest next
Slide and then um really 20 years later um I made Wildwood next slide um and this is using the book in very very different way um I really wanted to lead lead the Le reader in through a kind of sense of Enchantment into the book and through the page
Through the book and through the pages next slide through the page into the storm next and then back into what I called the safety of the book where the borders become constructed and in contained so this Wild Wood as it were is a wood that exists within the book um these were the
The thickets which needed sorting next slide and then in a sense the borders build up and that enabled me to bring in what I felt was the community of the wood that is the the the bark the lyen the snails next slide and flowers and also the sense of through the borders
Allowing the eye to move on through the page and I was very influenced by the Hasting books of ours which were made in the 18 1480s um this idea of in the page on the page and sort of in the lap of the reader thank
You and finally the there is a um a burn a waterfall in in this and it is really that sense of wanting um you know the wood to flourish and the importance of water in life next water is a really important theme of my work and this I go
Quite quickly is is a book called water on the border and here I’m using the book um this was a collaborative book with children and I’d been working with children in the school where my son was and and was very aware of the calligraphic way of working on the page
And so the idea of going to China and working um with children in China grew as well and I took the photographs of this reflections of the water drawing that to the page of the book so now rather than working through the page um in into the illusions of the page it’s
Much more working across the page next slide and this carried on in in my in my book between the two um photographed um I’m working w w with with the coldness of winter um stalks in the against snow this caligraphic Mark next and then moving along the French again this thing
Of moving across the page but here an Arabesque threading under so using the page and the book form in different ways and the Butterfly can fly next and this led to a kind of flowering within the book and this is um you know where I brought in a different sort of paper to
Slow the reading down to a kind of peeling a discovery of the flower within the book in the intimacy of the book that always that idea of of the reader and the book and that held handheld art form thank you the way I put this book together was
Across the floor and here you’re beginning to see this way that I began to work moving across almost finding the phrases in the in in the book next slide where something like Wildwood was very much made with a storyboard um where I worked it out and because I needed to
Contain each page contain the book within the pages of the book as it were rather than across the page next slide um unraveling the Ripple is also working across the page but if again it was folded into um the Codex which is such an economic um form of book um it
Would have been totally unruly as a as a an accordian um but I was next slide but it was also with the Turning of the pages I was able to move from the fluid of the sea and to the dryness of the of of the the of the sand and the plants
And the seaweed Etc so there’s this sense of fluid to dryness to then back to movement again and the Turning of the pages in in enabled that thank you but finally by about 2004 I did start making concertinas and this was a collaboration with Zoe Irving she did
The sound piece and I made the book we we explored um pu’s country and also by reading his his um novel In Search of Lost time there was very much this idea of moving from fact and fiction and from something seen to something felt or something remembered so as well as
Moving across the page and moving backwards and forwards in the page but also in a sense thinking of PR long sentences which he he actually wrote in in manuscript form often in scroll form next slide and this is how this was made on one sheet of um B1 paper um and then map
Folded with a map making um folding machine something that’s not around anymore thank you um but of course at that point there was a real tension about would the book survive and I began to think very much about perhaps um also creating smaller editions printers were beginning to to
Become sort of go under um so I I started printing digitally and I was also thinking of the nature of scrolling and how we had all begun scrolling through the digital thank you and that led to me realizing that I could finally be able to make or honor
This idea of the arms breath breath with the scroll um so you know these are now if you could say much larger Pages which the reader can um work to whatever size they want this was a collaboration with Valerie Gillis um with dundy University poetry Beyond text and Valerie um and I
Work quite closely together she gave me two well eight two line um two liners as it were um which is a Chinese form of poem and she wanted me to soften them in the process of me making them of sort of dipping them as it were into the image of the water next
Slide next and I think you can see how um using the digital printing um very fine paper Chinese paper schan paper I was really a wor able to work in quite a paintly way thank you and this then LED on to a much more ambitious scroll which was about 40 m
Long um and I just next slide and I just completed making that when I was invited to be part of a a research project with um taton University of the Arts the VNA um British museum um and it’s called transforming artist books I was asked to um speak about transforming the medium
And so I suggested I said would I would really like my scroll to be put onto an iPad um the beauty for me was this as well as the scrolling across the the way with an iPad you could go into the image so there was something of that Wildwood
Thing of going into the the page orbe it a screen thank you um and then here you can see I suddenly realized though having done that having made this um uh app um for the iPad uh or working with armadilla systems and tape research that actually had lost something of the wonderful
Breadth of the the the physical scroll and I’d come back to some thing of book scale again in some ways and quite contained next slide um I don’t want to that’s the last um piece that the the dunde have just a section of that scroll I didn’t want to
Leave my work at 2012 because there’s been a lot of other books since then um this was a book that I made for an exhibition I had a a retrospective of reproductions um books of printed matter and um I made this book and they published it and I just want I thought
It related right back to threads and just that importance of the beauty of the book as a place to put something in and to the the intimacy of it it can be a small poem a visual poem or it can be a long narrative the final slide is
Really um showing two ways of showing my books the printed matter um uh uh retrospective um in New York that I showed all the books and each one could be handled and then with all the kind of backdrop of of how the books were made and then at the fruit market Gallery um
The flow across a page was showing all the more the concertina and scroll Works um but I just come back to for me the beauty of the book of this Visual and the handling and the kinetic sense of sequence of moving through the book that’s it fantastic Helen thank
You okay um I see a question has popped up we’ve got four minutes left for questions so uh so question here from uh Bri I hope I’m pronouncing your name correctly and I think this yes this is this is um uh for um Helen please can you say how you worked in collaboration
With the children and did you ask them to do something specific yes um yeah the the the collaboration with children started with with with a cookery book with the school and I saw the this wonderful drawing that they were doing I took in all the objects and likewise
When it came to water on the border I took them down to the burn um just by the school and likewise in China in hangjo to the lake and and they drew um in front of the objects there was one time when they couldn’t in the Chinese
School and there was no translator and I minded being a tree and they all started drawing trees so that’s how I worked with them that’s great thank you um I don’t see any other questions popping up at the moment uh so what where weting with lots of thank you and lots of very
Positive comments about all four presentations so thank you all participants again and I guess I just maybe wanted to if we don’t have any other questions coming up there um reflect on our presentations and that you know that that I guess that it it it feels like it’s very difficult uh or
That artist books tend to defy taxonomy and tend to defy categorization by the very nature um and this feels like a good it feels like a good place to be to defy this Cate categorization um and it also feels in in a in a very positive
Way that it pushes back and that it’s impossible to find a stable definition for them which I think feels right uh it feels like a right and good good position good kind of creative and intellectual position to be in um I I see that we are really at time now and
I’m so sorry everything’s always so pinched all the time um but perhaps everybody could switch their mics on very briefly and we’ll give everybody a round of applause would that would we how does everybody feel about doing [Applause] that thank thank you all very much thank you again to our four wonderful
Presenters thank than you to Matthew for organizing this event um have a great evening and uh please feel free uh to to to follow up on any of the um to follow up on any of the of the works that you’ve seen here today obviously they’re
Very rich and we do hold a lot of them in our University collections so which are accessible through booking obviously so again thank you all very much thank you to our presenters um and have a lovely Evening