About Artist's Books

 

In recent years Bookarts has gained it's due consideration. Academics, Critics and Curators have reinvigorated the debate about what an Artist's book is. As might be expected their views are varied and often hotly opposed.

 

At ignition.ie we're happy to let the following brief statement sum up the world of Artist's Books:

 

'Why artist's books? Paintings are too big, sculpture is too heavy or needs to be plugged in. Performances and installations are too ephemeral. Books are the right size, the right price, and they don't soil your hands. You can take them with you on the plane without crating them and if you're sitting next to someone you don't want to talk to on the plane, you can always try pulling out an artist's book, which may dissuade them immediately. Artist's books appreciate in value but they aren’t the price of four years in college. And you can collect them.' Glenn O'Brien

 

Quoted from 'The world in your hand - the Artist's Book' by Mario Fusco, an essay in 'Fully Booked' Edited by Robert Klanton & Matthias Hubner.

 

'Fully Booked' was published by Gestalten in Berlin in 2008.
It's ISBN number is 978 - 3 - 89955 - 209 - 6

 

Below are a series of statements for most of our titles presented in alphabetical order.

 

Anthony Eden.

 

Both of his parents seem to have been peculiar. His Mother coped with being astonishingly beautiful while his Father, despite being free of money concerns and thereby able to devote himself to Art, was foul-tempered.

 

An aristocrat educated at what were then regarded as the finest schools, Anthony Eden fought at the front line trenches and was severely wounded. For the rest of his life he was tormented with ill health which frequently provoked him into seething rages. Isolated by a degree of snobbery which amounted to vileness he was particularly mean to his staff. Yet nowhere in three long volumes of memoirs and a further far more revealing last volume - mainly about his experiences as a soldier in World War One - does he so much as mention being awarded the Military Cross for outstanding bravery.

 

Nor does he mention the devotion of his troops or how passionately he loved his second wife. Always he pulls back - advances - but pulls back.

 

And so handsome, so extroadinarily handsome. Patrician and debonair, it was said of him that nobody else could wear a grey suit as well as he did. His career as a Politician had some moments of greatness and one truly shining decision but it ended in humiliation and disgrace.

 

By Keke Slootweg

 

 

Butterflies.

 

‘Butterflies’ is concerned with the past and the manner in which it intersects and affects perceptions of the present. Healy addresses the themes of betweenness embodied by displaced and diasporic populations using Victorian archival methodologies, museological objects and institutional forms of display, as well as 19^th century botanical and wildlife Illustrators. In this book the butterflies represent the many parallel lives that have lived and lost. Momentarily they overcome the brutal nature of their extinction, as seemingly disparate histories come together to form a rich tapestry of connection.

 

By Ciara Healy

 

Chunky Men with gadgets.

 

It’s cabaret night here at circus dazzle. So

there are photocopiers to calm down.

 

There are photocopiers.

There are photocopiers and

thumbs go through tissue paper and

there are those who are driven to battering their squeeling baby with a mallet

but

one can draw breath

 

but one can be lost in the swirling caterwauling

but one can draw breath

 

but

one can be lost and draw breath. And

calm down.

 

To find a yes.     At the core.     At the centre.   

 

A

Yes.

 

By Martin Crotty

 

 

Collaboration.

 

‘Collaboration’ is a companion book of ‘Where have you been?’

 

Two Perspex boxes are presented to a group of people. One is empty, the other is filled with 52 coiled pieces of paper. Every piece of coiled paper has an image, a question and a space to write an answer. The volunteers select their piece of coiled paper and, after adding their written answers, put them into the empty Perspex box. Gradually one box empties as the other filled.

 

The elements of complicity between the instigator and the ‘Reader’ is acknowledged freely both in the transparency of the piece, not least literally. This complicity can further be distinguished from ‘participation’ and ‘collaboration’ by means of the immediately apparent and clearly deliberate obviousness of the idea. 

 

The process by which the instigating idea needs to proceed necessitates a shared awareness that this idea is characterised by the need for participation to reach it’s conclusion or fruition. By welcoming that very participation it becomes a book. Other ‘Book-like’ elements such as there being paper and written words involved are in every sense material to the proposal that the two unnamed boxes are the book.

 

The unnamed two perspex boxes book is, as said and obviously transparent. It yields everything but the images, questions and answers on each coiled paper. If these are the contents, and certainly they are being contained, the Perspex boxes can be regarded as the cover for the book. Needless to say the questions and their accompanying images prompt answers as individual and various as there are readers. Some of those answers are given in ‘Collaboration’ but always with the understanding that these sample of answers made are not in some way ‘The’ answers to the questions. Arguably that is the distinction between participation and collaboration although, in my view, it’s entirely debatable in this instance which is which.

 

As for the questions, please see the statement for the companion book of ‘Collaboration’ which is called ‘Where have you been?’

 

By Joe Fahy

 

Crask.

‘Memory Boxes’ by Tom Crask.

 

Found and arranged objects, intended to enchant and provoke.

 

Tom Crask has been producing Memory Boxes for a number of

years. Created from found objects and inspired by the surreal art

of Joseph Cornell, each box alludes to its own story, creates its

own mood, and conforms to its own set of unique rules.

 

Each memory box is unique.

 

 

 

Here & Now.

 

This piece is made up of two companion books.

 

The first is called ‘ , one moment:1’ and it’s simply a series of three photographs showing somebody react to a famous public event. That event was entirely predictable. People tuned in from all over the world to witness it and many people had strong and differing reactions to it. The first time one reads this short book is entirely different to any other time. Any other time it lacks anything that it has when you first read it.

 

One could read it in terms of betrayal. The book is stripped of it’s very minor emotional charge the moment after it’s read. It resembles a joke inasmuch as it does have a punchline but unlike a joke which can be retold the absence of the intention to amuse renders it emotionally unsatisfying. After it’s read and because it is now so different from our first reading that intrusion of familiarity in some way undermines one’s recollection of how the book was first time around. It is a book which is really only effective for one moment.

 

The second companion book is called ‘From a lilo.’ I wrote for my twenties and thirties and only went to Art college when I was 41. I did it because I wanted to explore topics which I couldn’t find words for. I don’t believe everything can be put in words, or at least that there are some topics which are altered, somehow scared away by language. Even if there isn’t I had got as far as I could with words, it feels like freedom but I know it could just as easily be failure.

 

In ‘From a lilo’ I try to go to a place physically between words. When reading it one is physically placed outside the book but – as you well know - the ‘I’ that reads is not necessarily located within the ‘eye’ which is being used to perform the physical task of reading. In ‘From a lilo’ I present an option for locating the ‘I’ of the reader elsewhere. This is done by presenting entirely matter-of-fact information about where that ‘I’ is located. Congruity is the red carpet. ‘From a lilo’ is, or is intended to be, a series of neutral welcomings rather than a puzzle.

 

By Raymond Nagle

 

 

 

In A Village.

 

In a Village is the title of a series of small sculptures and collage watercolour images by artist Ciara Healy. The work draws inspiration from the rural village of Speldhurst, near Tunbridge Wells and is a poetic and visual journey through a graveyard, pub, park and woods. A signed limited edition artist’s book also forms part of the work. Many of the images contain collage cuttings taken from antique natural history books or children’s nature books. Transformed into flowers, butterflies and other animals, these cuttings act as a visual celebration of a place connected with nature and reflect upon the layers of lives that have gone before; the hands that tend the gardens, the dogs running through the fields, the birds that sing at sunrise.

 

Ciara Healy

 

 

Some Time With You.

The images in ‘Some Time With You’ tell the story of longing, loneliness and hope from an abandoned dog’s perspective. As you turn each page, your presence causes the dogs to cower in fright, approach you with hope, or receive you with love. I have been involved in domestic and wildlife rescue for a number of years and acknowledge how difficult it is to avoid cliché when making artwork that has such an emotive and sentimental content. When painting these dogs, I chose to eliminate all unnecessary detail, focusing instead on the way they gazed at me one damp May morning, as I stood in the concrete corridor between the cold grey kennels, my heart burning.

 

Ciara Healy

 

 

When.

 

In ‘When’ I try

to capture something of that feeling of heightened awareness of the now which occasionally rises up.

The very thought of it can draw now closer.

The very thought of it can draw now closer, somehow.

The very thought of it.

and nothing else.

Not a man with a gun or two men standing close together looking up at you

not bikini

when everything’s numb

from the quivering of holding a collie under the lake

until it spews a chalky mustard

when your every thought

is someone else

and your most cherished hopes

amount to the distinction between dying of burns and

snarking your knuckles in a photocopier.

 

When working out how little you can get away with tipping

when leaving a restaurant

becomes a hyper-vivid castration fantasy featuring cannibalistic fungi and

you’re as hostile to drawing the why distances towards you

as to remembering when

you were last so certain.

 

When you are pained by the fear of never being able

to love another.

When all is lost and losing,

wasted      deaf      despairing

when small dogs travel great distances to widdle on your facecloth

 

if       at this moment

one feels the fear

and laughs

one makes the single gesture which is being

greeted by rapturous smiling on planet soundless

and on your own.

 

By P.F. Marren

 

Where’s my swell American Dad?

 

They would have been the generation that made up ‘Band of Brothers,’ the generation of American men who fought so bravely in a just war and saved Europe from tyranny. No generation since has been as impressive.

 

The boomers always knew they had an impossible act to follow so they backed out of Fatherhood. Look at all these 55 to 60 year old men collecting the children of their second marriages from school, so desperate to get it right this time. And maybe they will this time. It’s not to them that we can look if we want to be good, let alone better fathers.

 

‘Where’s my swell American Dad?’ celebrates men made manly by commitment. These men were sufficiently at ease with their own choices that they could give their time to love. Here they are in wholesome poses, loved with ice-cream colours.

 

By Angelica Porchera