Evidence for Trees

Evidence for Trees

Edition of 4 handmade Artists’ Books. Spine: The Authentic Massacre of the Innocent Image, painting # 115. Accordion bound, text, paint, photographs, digital prints, photographs by Casey Aub. This was a book filled with strange words, written at a strange time in my life. 

Do you ever feel like you’re being coloured in said Casey?

What do you mean?

Like when you turn the pages of books people are sometimes red, or yellow, or blue, it’s a scratchy feeling.

---No said I, but some days when I wake up I feel so small I can walk under a coffee table and other days I feel so tall I cant get through the door.

Oh.

FACEBOOK

Face Book

Unique Book. 2014.  A book of ridiculousness compulsions. Let me give you an idea – about three weeks prior to the digital art festival celebrating ‘20 years of democracy’, I decided to paint the entire department for the staff exhibition. That’s  not five or ten portrait exercise, that’s about 80 portraits, all original paintings. The book is called Face Book - obviously!  The portraits are 25cm x 25cm in accordion format. If that was ALL I had to do, I would not be thinking I was vaguely mad – there are 80 of them! The bottom corner is Lindt - a rescue kitten who is all claws and ears at the moment. AND I understand why 'curiosity killed the cat'...

Toxic Bachelors

Toxic Bachelors

Unique altered book, mixed media, including collage, altered text, inserted letters, nuts/bolts, glass case. 

So this is an oldie, but a goodie. I heaved it out from under the building rubble - not the bricks and mortar rubble, the STUFF rubble. I’m SO in two minds as to what to do with my collection of books. I must have, altogether, over 1000 artists books, in the main, handmade. I really DO need a reading room. Toxic Bachelors was part of my altered books stage. It was made in 2008 - its hard to believe its ten years old. The book I chose to alter was Toxic Bachelorsby Daniel Steele. The story in the main concentrated on 3 successful, good looking blah blah blah men who gave up their bachelor status for love, of the novel kind. The original text of the novel was painted out and words appropriate to a more sinister meaning were kept. For example, the words remaining on the page dealing with Alegre Patrice, the sadistic, deluded Frenchman who was convicted of 115 murder/rapes are:…an unforgettable night…and for one night at least she had forgotten everything she wanted… Quite spooky and thoroughly unpleasant when one removes words and phrases from their original context. There’s a lesson to be learned there for sure.  Within the pages I collected and inserted letters from women who have had toxic men in their lives. It’s not a pleasant read. 

VISPO (Books One and Two)

VISPO (Books One and Two)

I well remember the rush when the announcement was made in December 2011 that there would be a collaborative vispo book on the IUOMA website. Once the call was placed in ether, places for the two books filled quickly.  The call was taken up by artists from USA, UK, Argentina, Russia, Belgium, Greece, Switzerland, Germany and South Africa - a fabulous selection of Mail Artists, some new to the genre and some longtime practitioners of this visual form of poetry. I was in the process of writing for the catalogue of The New Alexandrian Library, but far prefer material from De Villo Sloan’s introductions to the two collaborations.  From Book Two: “The visual poetry concept, for most of us, is best understood through the lenses of painting, photography, collage, video and similar genres: Contemporary cultures program us to be adept at reading visual images, image sequences (from montage in film), and visual syntax. We can readily accept the notion that written and printed language is part of the larger visual image landscape. Thus, it is plausible that text and image can be integrated to create metaphor, rhetoric, lyricism, narrative, non-linearity, form and even visual prosody – elements associated with literary tradition and the notion of the poetic".

"What is less apparent, but revealed especially by the work in this edition, is that the “Great Tradition” of poetry has evolved in such a way that visual poetry is now a viable, if not a desirable, genre in the post-literature of the 21^st century”.

If you are interested in visual poetry as an art form, I would suggest you take the time to read the introductions to these books, as they are succinct and insightful commentaries on this poetic form.

See:  http://iuoma-network.ning.com/group/collaborativemailartbooks/forum/topics/introductions-for-editions-1-2-collaborative-visual-poetry

A Curious Dream - Cheryl Penn

A Curious Dream

Unique Book accordion bound.  320cm  long by 21cm high, begun in 2011, finished in 2014.

I began this book in 2011 while in a flurry of idea implosion and excessive book activity. Quite a few books were begun during this time, but with no deadlines in sight, they lay, waiting completion.  The exhibition of  An Encyclopedia of Everything and Other Matters was the perfect excuse to go through these to see if any were worth finishing. This certainly was. The curious dream begins with “This place gave her the creeps. Everyone looked like half something. Like De Moreau had had a go. And there were Twelve Monkeys suffering from vertigo. The horn man said: What are you staring at”?