Artist books

Editioned and unique books, held in special collections including the V&A, Tate, the British Library, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Centre Pompidou.

Beautiful, strange and hypnotically compelling. Pale, evasive, almost disappearing. Dispersed as a typographical sediment, a residue of sorts, an apparition, an echo. One does not read my books in any conventional sense; one drifts into them and through them, following a cloud of tiny brackets, commas, fractured letterforms like a white rabbit into an ever-expanding hole of possibilities. One reads and then rereads my universe of continuously changing forms and patterns. Unimaginably thin pages contaminate surfaces, bleeding through one another until language seems nebulous. The whole book is nebulous.

I make poem books — what Eugen Gomringer called Gedichtbücher.

The books are typed onto the lightest Japanese and Chinese papers — ino-shi, gampi, tengujo at 6gsm. Typewriter ink is heavier than paper.

They are not books that ooze the power of authority. They are books that make one acutely aware of the fragility of the present, of material form — of how easily things fade, scatter, or disappear.

My doctoral research brought together artist books and Relevance Theory in cognitive pragmatics, relocating the ontology of artist book from objecthood towards encounter. reading.

The book seems carefully constructed yet simultaneously dissolving into a lucid dream, controlled and liquefied. The words float as writing and as an ornament, never fully becoming or not becoming one or another. It is a layered image. It is quiet, almost weightless. Composed of delicate, almost translucent sheets of paper, it diffuses the layers like milky autumnal fog. Turning the pages disturbs the patterns, making the book seem vulnerable, asking to be slow, to be careful when touching the paper, which lifts with each breath, with each shift in air movement. With each new page, a new pattern comes into focus, and a new set of words emerges in the image on the recto, while discarded pages accumulate on the verso, reproducing another misaligned picture.