Own goal: The Pillowbooks

Sometimes I feel like thinking about old work, the work that hasn't made it onto my current website.* So occasionally I'm going to revisit things as a little series I'm calling Own Goal. What follows is from 2009, edited from the original in my first &Duck blog. 

The Pillowbooks is a two-object artist's book comprising a complementary pair of concertina folds. It was made for my exhibition Pressings: Recycled Bookwork (Megalo Print Studio + Gallery, 2009), and sat so quietly in the show that I don't think many people noticed it.

The rationale for this exhibition was that the works in it were made from the remnants of other work; I used altered commercial books alongside pieces created from larger/more formal book projects that I'd worked on over the years. When I produced Transmigration, a fine press book of poems by Nan McDonald with drawings by Jan Brown, I printed the edition on paper called BFK Rives Grey, which is a lovely eucalypt grey-green colour. I also printed a much smaller, spare edition on BFK Rives White, and those pages are still sitting waiting for me to resolve them [2020: still!]... but there were sheet off-cuts from both editions. The green offcuts became part of the finished edition as endpapers, but some of the white off-cuts became The Pillowbooks.

It's a devilishly hard work to document, because the back piece is clean-embossed and stands upright, which means that the light is never right for a photograph. The front piece lays prone, which also makes it hard to get a good clear shot at the same time as the back piece.

So I'll describe them to you: The Pillowbooks is a set of two concertina book-structures, each containing the same piece of text. The text is paraphrased from a song called Be My Pillow by Australian outfit Machine Translations, from the album Happy. Somewhere on the old MT website it used to say this about the song:

Be My Pillow is about a great love affair between two home-furnishing impersonators.

LOL. In fact, it is a full-bodied, multi-layered and heart-smackingly rich paean of yearning that sounds amazing through headphones and something that I never get sick of. The words I've printed in letterpress from the lyrics on these sheets of paper are

NO WAIT    NO STAY

I WANT YOU TO

BE MY PILLOW

I was listening to the song one day and it made me think about relationships as pillows: how, when you're not in a relationship, you yearn for the comfort and companionship of a lasting relationship, and then, when you are in the thick of a comforting long relationship, you can still yearn for the crispness and freshness of a new encounter. And from another angle: being conscious that any relationship worth its salt doesn't stay fresh and surprising; it wears in, gets comfortable, becomes old. If it goes past comfortable and becomes lumpy and uncomfortable, do you accept that and keep on, or do you look elsewhere? If I stick with the pillow as metaphor here: do you keep the old pillow or buy a new one? Do you freshen up with a new pillow but hold on to the old pillow for sitting up in bed, for support? Do you ever just want to borrow a pillow for a while if you're feeling a bit flat at someone else's house? Is using someone else's pillow wrong? Do you think upgrading is decadent, unfaithful? Do you hate holding on to old things, and prefer making a fresh start every few years? Does the idea of taking off the pillowcase and seeing the pillow stains make you feel queasy? And the question that I asked in this post in 2009 but resonates years later: do you leave the pillow maintenance to somebody else?

Pillow books have been described as 'a collection of notebooks or notes which have been collated to show a period of someone or something's life.' Since the movie of the same name came out, a Pillowbook has been connected with a sex diary. 

So here are two 'pillows': one is fresh, white, crisp, stiff, embossed with the text (I used wood type, printed letterpress), folded in one concertina direction so that the first fold is a valley-fold, hand-sewn at one end (like the decorative end of a pillowcase) with crisp unwaxed linen thread that emerges from the thick fluffy paper jauntily. The paper deckle is at the top of the sheet, so the concertina can stand upright.

The other is folded in the opposite direction, mountain-first, and lays horizontal. It has also been embossed with wood-type, but the indented letters have been stained with watercolour, in that honey colour that pillows turn underneath the pillowcases from pools of drool and seeping hair-grease. The hand-sewn threads at the decorative end are limp and aged (really old: antique Victorian-era cotton, straight from the factory spool!). The paper deckle is at the base of the sheet; it doesn't stand up easily, and is quite unstable when it does.

Old, new. Fresh, used. Permanent, temporary. Loved, rejected. People can have such differing viewpoints about what is necessary, what is important, what they like/dislike/value. All of these thoughts sit in this simple piece of work.

I like the idea of making work that connects with specific pieces of music. So much of what I do and think about is accompanied by a soundtrack in my head, and to make concrete connections with this soundtrack excites me. I think hearing Be My Pillow is important to the reception of this work, but of course it isn't essential. It's an optional enhancement.

no wait

no stay

this will help you

along the way

no love

is lost

and i want you

to be my pillow

(extract from lyrics written by J.Walker)

Colophon: Caren Florance, The Pillowbooks, 2009. Artist’s book: two concertina folds of letterpress embossing and watercolour on BFK Rives paper, with antique Victorian cotton thread. Text by J.Walker, Machine Translations. Edition of 2 (available). [Dimensions TBC next time I find it in my archives] 

*My last big website, ampersandduck.com, was murdered by the hosting service when I was too bogged down in my PhD to remember to pay the hosting fee. Less than two weeks late with the payment, and every file was gone. Such a shock. Never mind, move on, start again, get on with it...