Déirdre Kelly
8th Artist's Books Triennial Vilnius: Venice 2019
The Art of the Book is part of the history of Venice, and the Scuola Internazionale di Graficais the ideal place to continue this tradition within the world of contemporary art with a program dedicated to artists working in book form. Venice offers the patrimony of the 'Biblioteca Marciana', one of the first libraries (constructed in 1537), which now has a collection of around one million items. The city is also the place where Aldus Manutius founded the Aldine Press; an innovative publisher of his age, his small portable books, (enchiridia), revolutionised personal reading, and today are considered to be the predecessor of the modern paperback. Within this incredible historical background, the Artists' Book Course at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica (first structured in 1983 by French artist Bertrand Dorny), has now been running for over thirty years.
The 8th International Artist's Book Triennial, Vilnius 2018: 'MEMENTO MORI', SG gallery, Venice. (Installation View)
The experience is today enriched by prominent invited guest artists who offer strength to a course which combines different media to make unique works or limited editions with text and image: artists such as Sioban Piercy from Ireland (currently guest artist in residence). Previous guest artists include Maria Lai (Italy), Uta Schneider and Ulrike Stoltz (Germany), Lena Bergstein (Brazil), John Ross (USA), Helen Douglas (Scotland) and Peter Koch (USA).
Sioban Piercy (Ireland) currently guest artist in residence at Scuola Internazionale di Grafica.
The Scuola also has an important collection of artists' books, a testament to over fifty years of activity. Vast in both variety and impact, approximately 400 books in total offer a resource of unique vision and inspiration for the artists' books course participants. The book collection includes donations from Italian and International artists, including: John Ross (USA), Bertrand Dorny (France), Maria Lai (Italy), Gerd Winner (Germany), Keith Achepohl (USA), Carrie Galbraith (USA), Amy Worthen (USA) , Helen Douglas (Scotland), Meri Gorni (Italy), Mandy Bonnell (UK) and Rainer Mordmuller & Claudio Ambrosini (Germany & Italy) .
The program is further enriched by exhibitions featuring bookworks at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica's 'SG gallery', a venue which is currently showing The 8th International Artist's Book Triennial, Vilnius 2018: 'MEMENTO MORI'. This is the third occasion that SG gallery has hosted the Triennial. In 1997, Kestutis Vasiliunas, artist and project curator, had the inspired idea for a truly International exhibition and travelling event. Over the period of twenty years, the Triennial has now included 1,610 artists from ninety-three countries who have submitted more than 3,000 artists' books. In its 8th edition and still attracting an unprecedented number of submissions from around the world, the touring exhibition began at The Martynas Mazvydas National Library of Lithuania in Vilnius, was subsequently shown at the Leipzig Book Fair in Germany, and after several locations in Italy, will then travel to the USA.
Anna Snædís Sigmarsdóttir (Iceland)
Magdalena Cordero Echeverria (Chile) – Prizewinner
András Butak (Hungary)
SG gallery
Organised by Circle Bokartas, and sponsored by the Lithuanian Council for Culture, The International Triennial of Artists' Books, Vilnius continues until 13 April 2019.
Frances Breen (Austria), Diane Britt (USA), András Butak (Hungary), Loretta Cappanera (Italy), Yuko Ebina (Japan), Magdalena Cordero Echeverria (Chile), Roberta Feoli (Italy), Roberto Gianinetti (Italy), Kristín Guðbrandsdóttir (Iceland), Nancy Hart (USA), Susanne Helweg (Denmar), Déirdre Kelly (Ireland), Koichi Kiyono (Japan), Marianne Laimer (Sweden), Silvia Lepore (Italy), Stephen Mumberson (UK), Katriona Persson (Sweden), Margit Pflügl (Austria), Miglė Pužaitė (Lithuania), Anna Snædís Sigmarsdóttir (Iceland), Motoko Tachikawa (Japan), Peter & Donna Thomas (USA) Celestina Vičevič (Croatia), and Carola Willbrand (Germany).
Scuola Internazionale di Grafica
Cannaregio 1798
Tel: (+39) 041.721.950
Email: info@scuolagrafica.it
Web: https://www.scuolagrafica.it/en/
Art North & Artists' Books
Our first issue of Art North magazine, due to appear this spring, will launch with what will be a regular section of the magazine dedicated to artists' books. The brief history of the format below offers an opportunity to introduce Déirdre Kelly, our 'Contributing Editor (Artist's Books)'. In Issue no.1, she will be sifting through her archives from The Hardware Gallery where, during the late-1980s and 1990s, she was the gallery's Director. Hardware Gallery is still fondly remembered for the support it offered to an incredible number of artists, many of whom turned to the artists' book format as a means to extend the accessibility of their art to a much wider audience. It's a privilege for Art North to have Déirdre Kelly as a member of our editorial team, certainly.
ARTISTS' BOOKS | A BRIEF BACKSTORY
Back in the early 1990s, there was a rapid growth of interest in artists' books in Britain that took many by surprise. A flurry of activity in the early part of that decade appeared to have been largely stimulated by a small but dedicated group of entrepreneurial gallery owners and book dealers who were responding to what seemed like a surge of productivity in this area by artists and makers from a broad base within the contemporary arts sector – in part a response to the output of well-known artists working with the book form such as Dieter Roth, Ed Ruscha, a broad grouping of artists associated with the Fluxus movement and, in Scotland, the printed works of Ian Hamilton Finlay.
Twentysix Gasoline Stations,
by Ed Ruscha, 1963
4 Baskets,
by Ian Hamilton Finlay with Kathleen Lindsley, 1990. (© 2018 Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay).
Ian Hamilton Finlay, Installation view of the exhibition presenting an extensive collection of Ian Hamilton Finlay's book works and printed matter at the Arnolfini, Bristol, in 2013. (Photo: Stuart Whipps, courtesy of Arnolfini).
The London gallerist Nigel Greenwood, who also staged an exhibition devoted to the books of Ruscha, was pivotal in the development of the 'genre' too, and as Nicholas Serota was to write following the Greenwood's death in 2004, Greenwood was:
…committed to what he called "introducing" the work to an audience, and his idealism encouraged him to follow the example of Ed Ruscha in publishing artists' books in editions of 500 or 1000, rather than catalogues. He saw this as a way of placing an "original" in the hands of an audience that could not afford to purchase a unique work of art. The gallery mounted the seminal exhibition Book As Artwork in 1972 and several of his "exhibitions" were essentially the launch of an important publication, as with Gilbert & George's books Side By Side (1972), and Dark Shadow (1976) […] Set up in the back room, he would allow you to look first at the exhibition, then at the international collection of artists' books which lined the entrance hall before engaging you in conversation or enthusiastically asking an assistant to show you further material.
Though Nigel Greenwood was instrumental in promoting the medium of the artists' book in London during the early-1970s, there wasn't anything particularly new about the medium from an international perspective – artists who had experimented with the bound or folded book format had been around for quite a while – but what was new was the popularisation of that medium and the manner in which it captured the attention of low-level art collectors who were being priced out by the contemporary art boom at that time.
The Book as Artwork. Installation photo from the Nigel Greenwood Inc Ltd., exhibition of 1976, (Image exhibited at 'Nigel Greenwood Inc Ltd: Running a Picture Gallery' – Chelsea Space, 2016).
If the visual arts had been a closed book as far as the general public was concerned, artists' books were meanwhile heralded for their democratising of the art object by some critics. In 1976, Richard Cork, then art critic for London's Evening Standard newspaper, had written an informative article that highlighted the medium and brought it to the fore in his response to the survey exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA, London) titled Artists' Books, booklets, pamphlets, catalogues, periodicals, anthologies and magazines published since 1970, in which were shown 609 works from what was then the UK's Arts Council collection.
Previously, In 1962, the ICA had exhibited book works by the Austrian dadaist and editor of Der Dada, Raoul Hausmann but, for Cork, there was a problem that lay with showing such a vast collection of artists' books. By the mid-1970s, a medium largely conceived to bring art directly from the studio or print shop and into the hands of the public was being récuperated by the wider gallery system of that time, and as Cork wrote in the Evening Standard, 'Whatever artists choose to do can, it seems, become grist to the exhibition mill. Even when they develop a means of production specifically intended to bypass normal exhibition outlets the results end up, stripped of their renegade pretensions, safely nestling in a gallery's womb – or should I say tomb?'
Gilbert & George, Dark Shadow, published by Nigel Greenwood Inc, London, 1976. A hardback artists' book with red marbled cover and block title in gold, printed offset in black & white (numbered 606/2000 and signed by the artists). [At the time of writing, copies of the publication are appearing on eBay for $1,200.00 USD or more – approximately £900.00 GBP at current currency exchange rates]
The tireless work of Greenwood aside, the problem was not so much rooted in the fact that artists were showing books in galleries, but more that galleries were somewhat befuddled by the issue of how to display them. After all, here was a format that on the one hand fell into the limited edition 'art multiples' category, much like printmaking, and yet functioned as an object for looking that requires being held in the hand. If the prospective buyer rocked up at a gallery dealing in prints, the etiquette was very much framed according to the 'hands off' rule when the drawers of a plan chest were opened and, invariably, the print would be behind glass and in frame before any prospective buyer would get within a hair's breadth of it. If they did get to see the print 'in the flesh', so to speak, it would usually be under strict supervision and with white gloves on hand. For many lower league artists of the period, this was not the scenario that they had in mind for their bound book endeavours, however. So what to do?
For the 1976 ICA exhibition, assembled in the form of an Arts Council show that would tour, Cork observed that the 'alternate art medium' of the artists' book was, at the ICA, removed of its context (as a book) before the public could even set eyes on it. Books displayed in cases, on shelves that prevented access in some way or other – or worse still, hung from the ceiling as objects beyond reach – meant that the reification of these 'art objects' was complete before the gallery doors even opened. Rather than be mounted, framed or sympathetically lit, the great asset of artists' books, thought Cork, was that they offered (or should offer) simplicity of access in an un-precious way: 'The very fact that they are displayed as exhibits in a gallery makes a nonsense of their true function,' he wrote.
THE 1990s | THE SHIFTING STATUS OF ARTISTS' BOOKS
Throughout the 1980s the issue of how to display artists' books was never really resolved by those who lacked the perspicacity and enthusiasm of Greenwood. By the 1990s, however, with the increase in demand, dealers and artists' book connoisseurs (yes, that was sometimes the descriptor that was used) were forced to think again about how to address the matter of display, and by the early-nineties a small number of galleries and dealers were springing up with the sole intention of dealing in artists' books alone. As one such dealer said to me in 1993, 'interest in artists' books has grown over the last decade or so as the book format is becoming more and more accepted as an art form in itself throughout the world.' That dealer was Déirdre Kelly who, with her sister Grainne, had opened the Hardware Gallery in North London – a small space but perfectly suited to the display of relatively small objects such as the artists' book.
British Artists Books collected during the period 1986-2000 when Déirdre Kelly was director of Hardware Gallery, London.
(Image © Déirdre Kelly).
As Kelly explained to me back then for an article I was writing for International Publishing Review, the definition of what did and did not constitute an artists' book was still up for debate, but as she saw it,
…the livre d'artiste or artists' book is a limited edition book with original artwork. The book thus becomes an entity in itself. As a genre, the livre d'artiste has attracted most of the greats of the 20th Century, including Picasso, Braque, Rodin and Léger. As an object the livre d'artiste is a machine for looking, each page turning to reveal a new experience. It is also an intimate experience, which presents the artist with a display medium other than that of a gallery. It is this intimacy and availability that has encouraged many artists to work in book form since the 1960s.
At that time, the artists' book was considered an object for which the artist not only provided the original artwork but often took the role of designer, printer and publisher. 'We have had a continued interest in promoting and exhibiting these works' Kelly told me, claiming that, 'we hold one of the largest collections of artists' books in the country, and since other artists' books dealers have closed down or ceased dealing in them, we have a very large slice of the market.
Le Chant des Morts (The Song of the Dead), by Pierre Reverdy & Pablo Picasso, An example of the livre d'artiste in the form of an illustrated book with 123 lithographs, by the artist, published by Tériade,1948.
Unlike many dealers of that period, the Hardware Gallery had an uncompromising policy towards their display. Most of their clients who called them, I was told, increasingly were asking first and foremost if they could touch them. 'Our answer is always yes. If we show books, they are on open display. We find the whole business of viewing them under glass cases anathema to the spirit in which they were conceived,' Kelly insisted on my first meeting with her. Clearly, there had been some movement concerning the issues raised by Cork.
Déirdre Kelly, former director of the Hardware Gallery, London, presents her artists' book collection. (Image © Déirdre Kelly).
Around the same period, in the October issue of Art Monthly in 1993, the artists' book critic, Cathy Courtney, who had been writing a column on the medium of artists' books for almost ten years in the pages of the London-based magazine, had sought to open up the debate further, highlighting the display policy of venues such as London's Victoria & Albert Museum. Some artists said Courtney, 'would prefer not to see their work exhibited under the available conditions, while others feel their books can be adequately seen in cases, and a few are simply glad to be able to list the Victoria & Albert Museum in their CVs. Other debates of the period centred on more basic questions, however, such as: 'What is, and what is not, an artists' book?'
Silvie Turner of Estamp Publications insisted that we understand the definition as borrowed from Marcel Duchamp – once claimed for the art object generally, it should be added – i.e. It's an artists' book if an artist made it, or if the artist says it is. For the most part such a search for definition seemed irrelevant and uninteresting, however, and many beyond artists' book initiates seemed to display ambivalence in the main. Some critics with an interest in 'art multiples' continued to document the production of such books, but largely without any value judgements emerging from a critical perspective. When shown, good books were often displayed alongside the feeble, artists with something to say (whether in graphic form, in their use of text, or in the interplay of both) shared space with those who appeared to have little to say at all, other than that they were now making artists' books, too!
By 1995, artists' book fairs had become a canny way of developing an interest in the format, largely resulting from the enthusiasm of private dealers who saw the art establishment (beyond private dealers such as Greenwood and a few others) as still wary. Credit for this must ultimately go to book dealers such as Marcus Campbell, who organised the first Artists' Book Fair in London from his shop, St James' Art Books, where he sold second-hand modern art books and monograph publications. Campbell who came up with the idea, mainly to take an uncertain market and develop it into something more coherent and easier to navigate, had devised a shelving system in his bookshop which offered artists a rented shelf space from which they could display and sell their books, and in a way that was both accessible and sympathetic.
Indeed, Campbell's foresight in this regard can now be seen to have been the prototype for how many dealers display artists' books still today, although, in the USA, where artists' books had been accepted much earlier, such display issues were far less an issue. As Campbell states:
I opened my first shop in Maddox Street in 1991, specialising in rare books on modern art; followed by a five-year partnership at St. James's Art Books in London's Piccadilly Arcade. During that time I also organised the first London Artists' Book Fair at the South Bank, which then moved to the Barbican Centre and the ICA over a period of 15 years. In 1998, in anticipation of Tate Modern's launch in 2000, I opened my present premises at London's Bankside, adjacent to Tate Modern.
Though Campbell also found that there were, by the late-1990s, more artists' book publishers than it was possible to document or catalogue, Silvie Turner was attempting to do just that for the publications that she was working on, including Facing the Page: British Artists' Books. When I interviewed her for a feature in Contemporary Art magazine, she told me that she was finding that there was only space to look at a limited range of British artists of the previous decade. With her co-editor, the artist Ian Tyson, they were attempting to document the books produced during the previous ten years, with an appendices highlighting research into British collections of artists' books and the marketing and promotion of them, too. It was an ambitious project, and Tyson's reputation as an artist working with book art himself was eventually to result in his work being collected together in the form of the Ian Tyson Collection at the British Library – the most extensive public collection of Tyson-related books in Europe, including books produced by his Tetrad Press.
One of the definitive works on British Artists' Books by Dr Stephen Bury.
Artists' Books: The Book as a Work of Art, 1963-2000, published by Bernard Quaritch Ltd. Bury was responsible for building the internationally renowned Chelsea College of Art & Design Library collection, and is now the Andrew W. Mellon Chief Librarian, Frick Art Reference Library, New York. His previous publications include Artists' Multiples (2001) and Breaking the Rules (2007).
Surveys of British Artists' Books by Silvie Turner.
Left: British Artists' Books 1970-1983 by Silvie Turner & Ian Tyson, 1984, Lund Humphries Ltd, Right: Facing the Page: British Artists' Books by Silvie Turner (ed.) 1993, Estamp.
As we moved towards the end of the 1990s, and although there seemed to be more artists working with the book format than ever before, there was still no general consensus on how to position the artists' book within the wider contemporary art context, however; at least from mainstream critics and art historians. In fact there was almost a cult-like status being attributed to the format, fostered by what might be described as network of marginal group of artists' book cultist collectors. That said, and somewhat paradoxically, no longer were we discussing the experimentation with the format from the greats of high-modernism or those identified with a conceptual art elite, but a massive surge in production as emerging British artists continued to catch on to the format's potential.
LOOKING TO THE FUTURE | ARCHIVING THE PAST
My own point of contact with the medium of artists' books withered somewhat around the end of the 1990s, but perhaps that is a good thing. Dr. Stephen Bury (who when I was a young undergraduate at Chelsea School of Art was the school's senior librarian) did some excellent work refining and cataloguing the output by contemporary artists, and defining the developing definition of what an artists' book actually was: 'Artists' books are books or book-like objects over the final appearance of which an artist has had a high degree of control; where the book is intended as a work of art in itself,' he was to write.
With the benefit of hindsight, and the manner in which artists' books from the period I've been referring to have become historicised, it is now possible to see certain artists as significant contributors to the format, while others, who seemed to receive a huge amount of commercial attention and press at the time, barely figure at later assessments of the format's development over previous decades. Twenty-five years after my first contact with Déidlre Kelly, she now tells me that recently she has been 'considering what might be the eventual destination for her artists' books collection.
The collection comprises over 600 books and a detailed list of the publications, which include works by Ron King, Circle Press, Ian Tyson, Bruce McLean, Alan Davie, to name just a few, and is available for online consultation on request. I am currently in discussion with a number of university libraries interested in acquiring such a didactic resource for their library too as, above all, I would like it to be available to inspire other artists.
Looking back, it is important to recognise the pivotal role that the Hardware Gallery played in developing the medium during the time it was in business. Kelly now lives in Venice, where she is a permanent artist in residence and curator of the SG gallery at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica, Venezia. The Hardware opened in 1986 and continued until 2001, with Kelly at the helm as its Director throughout.
The Artists' Book Historicized – a small selection from Déirdre Kelly's collection, which she regularly presents to groups as a means to highlight the medium's importance. Most recently she has shown her collection at the University of Bologna, and Scuola Internazionale di Grafica, Venice, which has also hosted presentations of artists' book for students of Indiana University and other graphic arts institutions. (Image: © Dérdre Kelly, 2018).
Certainly, there is no longer such a laissez-faire attitude to what constitutes an artists' book, nor how they change hands as commodities. In short, whether one approves of the definitions or not, definitions have been set out as part of the historicising process, and I think that this is important for the following reason: In the early 2000s it was not uncommon to read of all manner of 'zines' that were being marketed as artists' books, but in truth they were often hastily thrown together limited run publications for a niche market that had little to do with the contemporary art context of artists' books: on the zine fringe, such publications were produced for recalcitrant minority audiences on the subcultural periphery, and this could be easily seen in context at Somerset House in 2018 during the exhibition Print! Tearing It Up.
Print! Tearing It Up at Somerset House (Image: © Doug-Peters/PA-Wire, courtesy of Somerset House)
Although the exhibition was conceived as a means to highlight the history and diversity of journal and zine publishing and the impact of the British independent magazine scene today, the exhibition also included a two-day festival titled Process, celebrating independent media and making, and organised by OOMK (aka one of my kind), an art publishing collective run by Sofia Niazi, Rose Nordin and Heiba Lamara. Said the organisers of the exhibition:
Bringing together established and emerging designers, activists and publishers to explore, interrogate and share approaches to creative and collaborative process. In the context of high-speed media and access to infinite information, how do we create time, space and approaches that can enable us to process the social and political climate and create new media and outputs?
Process organised by OOMK the art publishing collective run by Sofia Niazi, Rose Nordin and Heiba Lamara at Somerset House. OOMK has been described as playing an active role part in London's small-press publishing community: as well as producing a printed zine and running a collective, they host regular creative events in the city. (Image: © Heiba Lamara)
Welcome therefore are the clear definitions of where independent publishing of zines and artists' book-making diverge in terms of output and concept. For example, the Good Press Gallery, based in Glasgow, has been described by the French Comic maker and collector Quentin Dufour as 'a great library of fanzines, artists' books, textual editions, artistic research, and editorial experimentation,' and so while we find the boundaries blurred somewhat, clear distinctions are being made. While for some that is fine, there is nonetheless a vibrant cross-disciplinary culture that Good Press Gallery contributes to – in terms of the artists' book as a medium that requires cataloguing and preserving, definitions are perhaps still required.
It may well be that the Good Press Gallery deals in artists' books, but it also deals in a lot more than that, clearly. As they state on their website they are 'a volunteer-run organisation with all proceeds staying within the space for its projects and development. We collaborate with artists, designers, teachers, students, organisations, and festivals.' Formed in October 2011, in order to provide a space to support the promotion, production and sale of independent publications, Good Press was previously based in the Glasgow cafe/bar venue Mono, which also hosts exhibitions, book readings, art performances and workshops.
Good Press Gallery, Glasgow. The gallery is situated at 5 St. Margaret's Place and open Tuesday to Saturday, 11 - 6pm. (Image: © Good Press Gallery)
While the development of a cross-disciplinary scene continues to develop, therefore, the definitions of what is and isn't an artists' book have meanwhile filtered through to national libraries, for which at one time the medium was a hugely problematic entity from a cataloguing perspective. The definitions that have now become widely accepted make it not just much easier to argue a case for the way artists' books are assessed and evaluated, but also how they are protected and conserved in light of their contribution to the broader culture.
Of course, this may well seem to run contrary to the scenario argued by Richard Cork, whereby artists' books emerged – in Britain particularly – as a means to bypass the constraints of the commercial gallery system, and democratise the art object by putting it directly in the hands of the public (something that galleries such as Good Press seek to rectify), but some form of preservation of the artists' book as cultural artefact was, and remains, required; albeit with us being ever mindful that entire editions are not lost to museum archives and rarely-seen collections.
ARTISTS' BOOKS IN SCOTLAND
The National Library of Scotland is one institution among many that have it right, I think. The definitions in the Library's literature on cataloguing its cultural artefacts are laid out very well. As the Library states, 'at first glance, the definition of an artists' book is quite clear: it is simply 'a book designed, produced, or illustrated by an artist' (Jane Greenfield, ABC of Bookbinding, 1998). But as with other kinds of art, artists' books ultimately resist definition.' Questioning whether an artists' books is a unique item, or whether there be an edition of a number of copies, and additionally if the artist is required to produce the book single-handedly from concept through printing to binding, the Library states that generally there is a difference from the traditional livre d'artiste, where the emphasis is on an artist illustrating a conventional book: 'The artists' books is an attempt to challenge the form of the book itself.'
National Library of Scotland's imposing George IV Bridge Building, Edinburgh.
The Art Libraries Society of the United Kingdom and Ireland has also produced a definition: An artists' books is, 'a book or book-like object in which an artist has had a major input beyond illustration or authorship; where the final appearance of the book owes much to an author's interference/participation: where the book is a work of art in itself,' which is almost word for word the definition given by Stephen Bury. On this basis, 'the artists' book as a form' it is claimed by The National Library of Scotland, 'began in the 20th century, developed further in its latter half, and still flourishes today.'
The benefit of the definitions are not purely historical or academic, however; they function as a benchmark for what the National Library may bring together from the many 'objects' that were previously scattered among its wider collection of cultural artefacts too. The Library may also selectively acquire artists' books according to the above definitions, in line with its remit as a conserver of Scottish artefacts (or those with a particular connection to Scotland). Among the Library's special collections, some artists' books can be found under the shelfmark for Fine Books (FB) therefore, while they also hold the Ian Hamilton Finlay Collection, in which the Library's existing holdings of the printed works of the Scottish artist and poet have been brought together (shelfmarked IHF, which can be searched for here).
Meanwhile, academic libraries are recognising their responsibility as possible repositories for the study of artists' books, too. The University of St Andrews Library in Fife, for example, has recently acquired a significant holding of work by the Fife-based artist Jean Johnstone. Johnstone, in collaboration with Scottish and international poets (including John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie, John Glenday, Michael Longley, Anna Crowe, Anna Aguilar-Amat and Christopher Whyte), uses etchings, pen and ink drawings, leaf and bark papers, beeswax, silk and linen, to create hand-made, hand-scripted artists' books and, according to the Saltire Society, her books are unique in their approach to the interpretation and manifestation of poetry, being exclusively created for acquisition by libraries in order to maximise public availability.
Artist's books hand-made by Fife-based artist Jean Johnston, in collaboration with Scottish and international poets. Some of the handwritten poems are parallel translations between English, Catalan or Gaelic. The University of St Andrews, Fife, has acquired a complete collection of Johnston's artists' books. (Image: © University of St Andrews).
Beyond the National and University library collections in Scotland, there is also a vibrant interest in current makers of artists' books here, thanks to initiatives such as the Artists' Book Market, Edinburgh, the main event in Scotland for artists' books, hosted by the Fruitmarket Gallery. There are also several makers who have built an international interest in Scottish artists' book-making, and among them are Weproductions, which artist Helen Douglas describes as a paradigm of a generation of artists' books characterised by unlimited editions, paperback format and offset printing.
Weproductions is both Helen Douglas and Telfer Stokes, and their publications demonstrate an exploration of the book form to structure visual narrative. The potted history that Weproductions offers for those unaware of their activities reads as follows:
Weproductions was established by Telfer Stokes in 1971 and joined by Helen Douglas in 1974. In 1976 it moved from London to Deuchar Mill, Scotland, where a printing press was set up in 1979. After two decades of in-house printing and working with small presses in the States, the late '90s and 2000s brought about new changes: returning to the use of commercial offset printers for larger multiple editions and the introduction of small hand-printed digital editions. Douglas continues to make and publish from Deuchar Mill: her e-scroll The Pond at Deuchar has recently been published by Tate.
When I contacted Douglas recently to ask how WeProductions have built such strong ties with the USA, however, Douglas explained that, 'during the 1970s when we began making and publishing artists' books, the connection with the US was important, both as a place of inspiration and of shared ideas. We took each new book over to New York, placing them in bookshops and galleries.' By the 1980s they were also being published and working with presses in the United States, also. In 1976, Weproductions had first made contact with Printed Matter Inc., and the relationship grew from there:
When the NY Artist Book Fair got going in the early 2000s, I was invited over by Printed Matter and took a stand there for a number of years, but when Printed Matter moved to its premises on 11th Avenue, the director Max Schumann wrote to me inviting me to make a show of Weproductions and my more recent solo work.
As Schumann summarised to Douglas, 'Your presence and participation in Printed Matter over the span of our history is enduring, and your contribution to the field of artists books is so significant, we would love to provide an in-depth view of your practice, and introduce it to audiences both old and new.'
Illiers Combray, a collaborative work by Helen Douglas and Zoë Irvine. Aeolus & Weproductions, 2004. Edition of 500 (now into 2nd edition of 400). The book won the Birgit Skiöld Memorial Trust Award LAB 04 and the Seoul International Book Arts Award 2005. (Image: © Weproductions)
From such international hookups to the enduring artists' book fairs in the UK, Edinburgh College of Art's Bookmarks Artists' Bookfair, is a little further down the food chain. It is encouraging that it exists, for sure, but trying to get any response from the organisers for their 2018 event proved a fruitless exercise, for me, at least. There are reasons for this, though, perhaps. After all, the organisers (drawn from the University's teaching staff as far as I can ascertain), include Teaching Fellow in Illustration, Lucy Roscoe. When I contacted her in March 2018, she explained that staff had been 'snowed under with planning, and juggling a teaching load as well.' What Roscoe perhaps inadvertently reveals is the amount of work involved in putting together such events, and expecting hard-pressed academics to do this while under the very real pressure of time in other areas, is not necessarily conducive to the development of Bookmarks as a signature event for the College of Arts in the wider UK book fair calendar. As a faculty-run enterprise it is interesting, but can it grow beyond that?
The Bookmarks Book Fair does encourage and present some interesting work that is worthy of attention, however. Make no mistake about that. The College's Art, Space + Nature programme (which offers a multidisciplinary framework to explore the complex intersections between creative practice, spatial theory and environmental issues) exhibited work at Bookmarks 2018 with artists' books made as part a field trip to Forsinard in the far northern Highlands, where the so called 'Flow Country' peatland restoration project in Caithness is ongoing.
Forsinard lookout tower at the peatland restoration project in Caithness.
The ASN postgraduate students' artists' books presented at Bookmarks 2018 were described as an investigation of the interplay between artists' book-making and a wider response to the environmental concerns of the northern landscape. Among those producing books connected to the ASN programme were Alex Hackett and Alix Villanueva who together operate as Pearl Moss Press. While Hackett is based in the Outer Hebrides, Villanueva lives in Edinburgh.
Pearl Moss Press present their book works at Bookmarks 2018, Edinburgh Collge of Art. (Image: © Audrey Yeo, courtesy of Pearl Moss Press).
Hackett and Villanueva's Pearl Moss website has a catalogue of all their publications to date – books that as Hackett states, 'explore entanglements between art and the natural world through poetic text, drawing, photography and tactile material.' At Pearl Moss Press, she says, 'we frequently use the artists' book as a tool to accompany elements of artistic practice, such as visual exhibitions, event-based work and public art commissions.' Relevant here are their publications Lichen Talk and An unconventional romance between a desert and a peat bog, which were both made in response to fieldwork undertaken at Forsinard. Lichen Talk by Villanueva is an intimate exploration and encounter with minute lichen in the vast landscape of the bog, opening up the ways in which we relate to the non-human, while An unconventional romance between a desert and a peatbog is a collection of poetry described as written between the blanket bog and the Sahel desert, with a handmade paper insert, peat-ash and crustaceans from the Isle of Lewis.
Tangle, a collaborative project by Alex Hackett and Alix Villanueva of Pearl Moss Press (Image: © Pearl Moss Press, 2018)
Another of their books of note is Tangle (above), which was a collaborative project by both Hackett and Villanueva that Hackett describes as 'the mysterious, complex and historical relationship that humans have with seaweed'; something that is also explored in the Pearl Moss Press publication Carrageen Apparatus that accompanied an exhibition of the same name, imagining and re-inventing the harvesting equipment and culinary tools used to gather and prepare the seaweed Carrageen which is found and used widely in the Outer Hebrides.
In light of the above, what we can be sure of is that, across Scotland, and more broadly the international scene, the creation of artists' books doesn't seem to be receding in terms of activity or interest. In mid-2018, there was an exhibition in New York City of work by Weproductions (also based in Scotland) at Printed Matter, and the market for artists' books by Scottish makers seems to be growing internationally, still. Far from being consigned to the archive as a forgotten medium, therefore, there is much potential for the development of the artists' book format yet. Something that, in terms of the format's ongoing development, we will be regularly covering in Art North!
For more about the Hardware Gallery, refer to issue one of Art North, or subscribe to the magazine for a regular roundup of news concerning the artists' book format today, its often complex history, and its future development.