Care in the context of the artist book

When Craft ACT puts on its annual member's show, the exhibiting members are asked to contribute in some way: help with bump in or bump out, or give a public talk. This has been an insanely busy year for me, so as much as I enjoy a good old 'patch & paint' session, I put my hand up for a floor-talk. The theme of this year's exhibition is CARE, and we were asked to consider how this relates to our work. 

I've had no access to a studio for most of this year, so I entered a book that I printed last year for BOOK ART OBJECT, called L OO P. (I did get a chance to print two things this year before the lockdown and subsequent closure of the art school for repairs, but one was a personal work for a retiring friend and the other hasn't been shown in the exhibition it was made for). 

Here is my talk: 

Floor talk, Craft ACT, 28 November 2020

I don’t know how you can be any kind of creative maker without a sense of care, and particularly --  unless you’re a purely digital producer -- a care for materiality and its affordances. By ‘affordances’, I mean what materiality is capable of doing and saying. Glass and paper can both fold and foreground translucency but working with them to do so demands very different skill-sets. My practice has shifted dramatically the last 20 years: I am less interested in material perfection, and more interested in material projection: what can I say and do with a particular object or a particular material? 

Artist books are hybrid creatures and resist strict definition: they can be made from anything, look like anything, they don’t have to be precious nor do they have to contain text. They do need to be made by an artist. I care about them as a field, and most of my work responds intellectually to how the field itself has changed over time. My current concerns are fixed on the affect of materiality and also on conservation issues, from the object itself to its presentation and preservation in archives and on the internet. Many of the books I used to see online have disappeared, thanks to huge cuts in institutional collection budgets and what is recognised now as online ‘link rot’ and ‘content drift’. 

My piece in this show, L OO P, is an artist book based on a series of poems about birds and the disrupting of their international migration patterns. There isn’t a bird in my book. It is bereft of living things. It was made as part of a long-distance collaborative project by a group of book artists: We call ourselves BOOK ART OBJECT: we start with one text and each make a book response to it. It’s our fifth project, and the text is by Queensland poet John Bennett, who wrote a series of 26 short poems about Chinese-Australia bird migration. We have birds here in Canberra that migrate to China and back, and they are losing their landing sites in China and Australia thanks to industrial encroachment into their wetlands. I edited John's text down to the bare bones, and pushed his quiet, polite worries into desperate territory. 

Visiting China myself in 2015 shook me to the core. Hangzhou is a domestic tourist destination. It is the ‘Willow Pattern Plate’ city, full of lakes, pagodas and willows. In 2016, the year after I visited as an international tourist, Hangzhou received over 136 million domestic tourists. The air was thick with smog. Everyone had to drink from plastic bottles as the local water is undrinkable. There were electronic signs at every tourist attraction giving updates about crowding and air pollution indicators. There were very few birds. 

When I got home to Canberra, I almost kissed the ground gratefully: clear air, clean drinkable water, wide open urban spaces interspersed with natural spaces, lots of birds of many kinds. But when I walk through our wide empty urban spaces, my retina still populates them with the masses of people I saw in every public space over there. I have not used a plastic bottle since my trip.

L OO P is a good example of how I react to experience and concerns and weave it into my work. I chose what is called a Dos-a-dos binding, which makes two joined book-blocks that allow the reader to turn and turn again, like a dance.  The binding is a journey, back and forth, like a bird’s annual migration: There to here; here to there. I no longer use glue in my bindings, again because I care about longevity; glue, even inert glues, ironically add instability and make them more vulnerable to decay.  Its book pages look battered because they are: the Chinese papers, pristine when I bought them in China, have been carried home in my luggage and through three house moves. They show their travel. I have pared John’s text down into chunks, and printed it in handset letterpress. I also printed wood and metal text with its back turned, plundered ‘hell type’ (years of type not put away by students) and printed that in white so that it shows fleetingly in the hand’s page-turning motion, and drew and erased through the book to give it a sense of my anger and futility. All of this is what I mean by material affordances: every aspect of my work is deliberate, considered, and meaningful. 

Since making L OO P, Canberra has been polluted from a horrendous season of bushfire smoke that left fine P2 particles in our lungs and our landscape. We have been closed down and locked in by a virus that emerged from a warped relationship with nature. Things need to change fast. We say this again and again: I am old enough to know how long we have been warned about climate change, and the ravages of rampant capitalism, but no-one pays attention. People are just hoping that it all goes away and we can get back to “normal”.  But things are just going to loop and swirl until something even more dramatic happens.  I will continue to care about the small details, the impact of material outputs and about working in ways that can directly affect people, one by one. I will continue to care about my work as a means of therapy against despair.