Month: September 2019

Free events on the 5th October

Free events on the 5th October

Everything is now live on eventbrite for you to read through and see what you fancy taking part in! There are some great things going on so do take a look. Just to wet your appetite here is our leaflet detailing what is available if 

Exhibition up in Sheffield

Exhibition up in Sheffield

This week we installed an exhibition in Sheffield Central Library to get people interested in Artists books and the Fair on 5th October (just in case you had forgotten!) The selection was made from the Sheffield International Artist’s Book Prize collection which is over 800 

Anne Rook

Anne Rook

How did you become involved in artist’s books?

Some 20 years ago I met Bristol artist Annabel Other who had started a portable, fully functional public library. I made a small 

‘Pocket Dictionary of Greediness’ for her library and was fascinated by the concept of a small art work which could be picked up, leafed through and enjoyed at leisure and privately, away from the formal context of museum or gallery.

I have continued making artist’s books. These are often closely linked to my other multi media works. 


What is the focus of your practice?

Repetition of images, forms or marks underlies my practice. In the process of repetition, differences between the elements emerge, often creating an emergent property or meaning. And in the act of repeating time is experienced and its unwinding creates memories or suggests a narrative. 

What are you working on at the moment?

Recent and current books focus on the representations of journeys through simple marks or through the construction of maps. The tedium of long and unfamiliar journeys with the accompanying feelings of displacement and dislocation is made visible through repetitions.

Prance Press

Prance Press

How did you become involved in artist’s books? Making books began as a way of finding a home for words that spilt out of me. As I learned the scope of materials, the books I made became as much about the production as the words 

Case Room Press

Case Room Press

Philippa Wood How did you become involved in artist’s books? My initial interest came from when I organised a book-binding workshop for a group of graphic design students; at around the same time myself and a colleague inherited a treadle press from a local high 

Helen Scalway

Helen Scalway

How did you become involved in artist’s books?

I trained as sculptor at Chelsea but became more and more interested in artists’ books as a means of enacting book/sculptural sequential ideas.  I also liked the modesty and portability of artists’ books, the way you can have a real one-to-one relationship with them and the way you can have a one-off book, or make a few, or many, and they can be inexpensive, accessible. So, my practice changed. 

What is the focus of your practice?

For some time, I have been working on the metaphor of the house as standing for the self, so my recent artist’s books have been exploring this. In 2018 I curated a show called ‘If We Were Houses’, inviting several professional artists to portray themselves as houses. I asked each artist: If you were a house, what kind of house would you be? This is because the question seems to me to be a revealing one, opening into a potentially innovative mode of self-portraiture: the house as a fertile metaphor for the self.   

What are you working on at the moment?

I am currently working on a presentation on the ‘If We Were Houses’ project at The Towner Gallery in Eastbourne, Sussex. I am also thinking hard about a set of artist’s books, each one enacting different characters as ‘houses’.

www.helenscalway.com

Tim Shore

Tim Shore

How did you become involved in artist’s books? I have been exhibiting books since 2015, with my first book, ‘a history’, at the 18th International Contemporary Artists’ Book Fair at the Tetley, Leeds. That year it was also selected for the Sheffield International Book Prize 

Pat Hodson

Pat Hodson

How did you become involved in artist’s books? I stumbled into making books in 1990, while working with a laborious process, involving liquid dye and silk. I deconstructed the process into a 12 image sequence, which reveals how the colour, repeatedly and randomly overlaid, retains 

Gnobilis Press

Gnobilis Press

Alastair R. Noble

How did you become involved in artist’s books?
I have made artist’s books throughout my artistic career. I trained, as a printmaker therefore the production of artist’s books was a natural transition. In light of this, I have employed a number of printing techniques in the fabrication of my books including etching, silkscreen, cyanotype and letterpress. In the last ten years my books often reflect on large-scale environmental schemes I have been involved with not necessarily as documents but works in their own right that supplement these projects. 

What is the focus of your practice?
I identify myself as an environmental/installation artist. My artistic practice is a response to architecture and the natural environment, and reflects on particular sites in the context of poetry and literature. The writings of Mallarmé, Marinetti, Mayakovsky, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Borges, Poe and Daumal have all been the genesis of numerous projects. Texts by these authors are transposed into artist’s books, installations and interventions in the landscape. 

What are you working on at the moment?
From October 2018 until March 2019 I was living In St. Monans Fife where I produced a series of drawings that transposed the poem “On a Raised Beach” by the Scots poet Hugh MacDiarmid into calligraphic notations that map the coastline of East Neuk. I am currently in the process of transforming these drawings into an artist’s book.

Michelle Holland

Michelle Holland

How did you become involved in artist’s books? I have been making books for over 15 years, an interest that grew from a retreat I was on in Portland, America.  What is the focus of your practice? Beachcombing has always been a passion of mine,