Research

Italo Calvino imagines reading as picking up dispersed particles, points, tiny fragments, and drifting residue that combine and recombine into meaning. Phrases. Rhythms. Visual segments. Dust. Cultural, historical and remembered particles that settle onto words, images, and objects, as if they were porcelain figurines.

Reading an artist book means navigating pulviscular fragments of text, photographs, matter, or, in relevance-theoretic terms, negotiating an accumulation of weakly communicated assumptions: peripheral resemblances, lingering echoes, weakly manifested connections, that expand interpretation towards broader ranges of weak implicatures and non-propositional effects.

Reading an artist book is a cognitive, perceptual, and aesthetic experience. While artist book scholarship has frequently approached artist books through art history, small-press publishing, institutional categorisation, or maker-centred discourse, comparatively less attention has been given to the reader’s encounter itself. I bring artist book discourse into dialogue with Relevance Theory in linguistics, arguing that artist books emerge through iterative and accumulative acts of reading in which linguistic, visual, tactile, spatial, temporal, and material cues interact simultaneously. Drawing on the relevance-theoretic concepts of ostension, inference, weak implicatures, contextual effects, and expectations of relevance, the thesis develops a materially attentive account of reading.

I relocate the ontology of the artist book from objecthood to encounter.

Fragility, opacity, illegibility and sequencing are active ingredients in interpretation.

Writing it was an experiment too, balanced between the academic and the poetic. There is a methodological difficulty in approaching one's own work from the distance of analysis while articulating it from the inside — positions that do not coincide.

Thesis

Artist Books. Between Word and Image. A Relevance-Theoretic Perspective. PhD, Slade School of Fine Art with UCL Linguistics, University College London, 2018–26. Supervised by prof. Sharon Morris and prof. Robyn Carston. I use a Relevance-Theoretic framework to argue that the artist book is constituted not as a fixed object but as an evolving perceptual event, in which meaning emerges through the reader's iterative and accumulative engagement with linguistic, visual, tactile, spatial, and temporal cues, thereby relocating the ontology of the artist book from objecthood towards encounter. The thesis develops through three case studies alongside my own practice: Ulises Carrión's Looking for Poetry / Tras la poesía, Taca Sui's Steles – Huang Yi Project and Eugen Gomringer's 5 mal 1 Konstellation. 2019–22 Malcolm Hughes Research Bursary, the Slade, UCL

Publications

Čiricaitė, E. (2026) 'On Decoy Books: Do Judge the Book by its Cover'. In: Artist's Book Yearbook 2026–2027. Bristol: Impact Press, pp. 22–31.
Čiricaitė, E. (2024) 'The Relevance of Relevance: A Glance at Artist Books from Pragmatics; and a Few Observations'. The Blue Notebook: Journal for Artists' Books, 19(1).

Conference papers

2026 'Word, Word, Line, Line, Line, Line, Line, Line, Line, Line, Page, Book: the Art of Reading Ulises Carrión’s _Looking for Poetry/Tras la Poesía_. A Relevance Theoretic perspective.'. After the Fold: Contemporary Approaches at the Intersection of Artists' Books and Experimental Poetics, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest, 28–29 September
2026 'Reading the Inferential Space Between Page, Photograph and Paragraph: Taca Sui's Photobook Steles – Huang Yi Project'. Cognitive Futures in the Arts and Humanies: Stories in Mind. Narrative in Cognition and Culture, Catholic University of Portugal, Lisbon, 15–17 July
2025 'The Art of Reading Ulises Carrión's Looking for Poetry / Tras la Poesía. A Relevance-Theoretic Perspective'. UCL Artists' Books Symposium: Structures/Infrastructures, University College London, 9 June
2025 'Book as Object'. Invited keynote, Materiality of the Book Symposium, Royal College of Art, London, 7 April
2022 'Looking for Poetry Between Word and Image in Ulises Carrión's Artist Books'. Image/Text – What/Next?, Humanities Research Centre, University of York, 24 June
2021 'Between Seeing and Reading: What Relevance Theory Can Reveal About Artists' Books?'. IMPACT 11 International Printmaking Conference, Hong Kong Open Printshop, 20–25 April

Symposia and events organised

2025 Verse Verso: Visual Poetry and Artist Books. Symposium organiser, the Warburg Institute, London, 30 May
2018–21 Artists' Books Now. Organising committee, the British Library, London
2019 The British Academy Summer Showcase with Artists' Books and Medical Humanities (University of Kent). With Dr. Stella Bolaki. The British Academy, London, 21–22 June

Teaching

2025 – ARTIST BOOKS: ___ the idea, the form, and the realities of making ___, online course.
2020 tutor, Artist Book: from Concept to Distribution, Leicester Print Workshop
2019–24 tutor Writing Ecologies, BFA3, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL
2015–20 Associate Lecturer, Camberwell College of Arts, UAL