The blue notebook: Journal for artists’ books, Volume 17 No 2, Spring – Summer 2023

Abstract

Editor: Sarah Bodman

In this issue:

Amador Perez -art… books… art books… artists’ books… As a child I had access to the world of art through printed reproductions on postcards and books. As a teenager I collected facsimile publications sold at newspaper stands. I liked to read about the life of artists, but I was transported by the printed images of their works, which I examined as intensely as I did the originals I found in the museums I could visit during that time, with a sharp and passionate regard, trying to understand how they were made in order to satisfy the great curiosity they awakened in my spirit. Then, back at home, I would take my drawing board and try to reproduce the works I admired most. To copy the reproductions employing graphite, watercolour or oil on canvas was the manner I found to become even closer to the original works and to enter into the author’s creative process.

Noriko Suzuki-Bosco, a UK based Japanese artist and researcher, reports on the Otaru Book Art Week, a book art event that has been taking place for the last 12 years in the small port town of Otaru in Hokkaido, Japan. She recounts her visits to the different venues and the artworks seen.

Jess Richards Un/tellable Stories – An Essay in Images and Lists . These images and process lists are part of an ongoing hybrid art/creative writing project. This essay demonstrates part of the project which explores storytelling and layered texts. When text is visually layered the reading process becomes inventive. “Where there is writing – or something that looks like writing – there is always something to read. Resistance in one layer might re-route reading to another.” (Hall 2013, 88) This essay in images and lists shows new and old stories being written and hidden.

Making places, making poems: process and performance in landscape book arts by Anna Reckin – Artists’ books that feature a single poem, or a themed sequence, are very familiar and widely appreciated. I’m interested in those that go a stage further: where the artist’s book form is more than a decorative vehicle for poems that could (and often do) appear subsequently or in parallel in mass-produced formats. Just as a standard print or performed poem will not work in prose paraphrase, so these artist’s book poems are only fully realised when seen as text-art objects where linguistic and material invention are inextricably intertwined. The examples discussed here, a surreal re-enactment of suburban territory, and an ecopoetic reconfiguration of Welsh coalfields, push hard at Charles Olson’s contention that ‘Form [in poetry] is never more than an extension of content.’ Here the content – landscape and its construction through natural and human forces – both extends and is intimately bound up with the form.

Composing in Colour and Line: An Interview with Artist and Bookbinder Timothy C. Ely by Jennie Hinchcliff, Exhibitions Manager at the San Francisco Center for the Book, USA. In the forty-plus years he has created codexes, Ely estimates that he has completed hundreds of works. The elaborate use of composition, sweeping colour palettes, cribriform writing, and dense, diagrammatic drawings are hallmarks of his work.

It’s art and it’s a book – but no art book. How artists’ books are testing the limits of libraries by Lilian Landes, curator of the collection of artists’ books at the Bavarian State Library, Germany.

Cover design and featured artist throughout this issue: Mark Addison Smith.

• Journal Article Type: Editorial
• Acceptance Date: May 1, 2023
• Online Publication Date: May 1, 2023
• Publication Date: May 1, 2023
• Deposit Date: May 12, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: May 12, 2023
• Journal: The Blue Notebook: Journal for artists’ books
• Electronic ISSN: 1751-1720
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: Volume 17
• Issue: No 2, Spring – Summer 2023
• Pages: 72
• Series ISSN: 1751-1720
• Item Discussed: artists' books, artists' publications
• Keywords: artists' books, artists' publications
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/10780430
• Publisher URL: https://www.bookarts.uwe.ac.uk/blue-notebook/
• Related Public URLs: https://www.bookarts.uwe.ac.uk/blue-notebook/
• Additional Information: Free download at: https://www.bookarts.uwe.ac.uk/blue-notebook/