Unfurled: Encounters with Artists’ Books, Grosvenor Museum
Words, Hannah Harry
Pictures, Tim Daly
What are artists’ books? How are they made? And how are they different to any other type of book?
Unfurled, a showcase of works produced by staff and students at the University of Chester and partners Wirral Metropolitan College, reveals that there really is no single category for defining what constitutes an artist’s book. A plethora of mediums have been used to make the books on display at the Grosvenor Museum, from etching and silk-printing to drawing, photography and embroidery.
The books range from graphic novels and luxury fold-out photograph albums to handmade zines and embroidered scrolls. In some instances, existing books – that is, items whose classification as book pre-dated the intervention of the artist – are adapted, added to or destroyed to make something new altogether.
Lynne Connolly’s Untold is a series of six books arranged to resemble a set of stand-alone cogs whose closeness nonetheless reveals their interdependence – each art object affects and influences the next. Text has been extracted from each book and words conjoined to create nonsensical phrases ‘Imaginent’; ‘Exceptaphonical; ‘Prohaving’ – the sight and sound of which remind us of language’s own joyful and enigmatic life, beyond interpretation. The Lear-like playfulness of Connolly’s word combinations invites us to see language as an artwork in its own right – here art object and poetry combine, revealing the illusionary nature of meaning and understanding.
The relationship between word, image and object is a key theme throughout the exhibition – with almost all works, even those that do not appear to rely creatively on text, having a word somewhere upon them – usually as part of a book’s title. Jeremy Turner’s bronze Manual features the single diminutive word ‘recipes’. The bronze, a cast of a cookery book belonging to Turner’s mother, is a monument to the ‘thingness’ of books: an object that reveals books’ glorious tactility while resisting any attempt to interpret them as vessels of information or knowledge. The solidity and silence of Manual challenges our instinctive impulse to open its pages; it will not be seen through, it will not be read as anything other than itself.
Conversely, a series of artists’ zines invite us to leaf through their pages and interpret their contents. Made inexpensively on paper with laser printers, these ephemera encourage us to look beyond their physicality to interpret their meaning; the decision to present the zines on a shelf for handling nonetheless invites us to celebrate, through the literal act of touch, this very same physicality.
The linearity of book form has been used in some instances for the purposes of creative and personal storytelling. Mary Gelsomino’s My Beast explores the interiority of the mind through a fold-out of beautifully vivid and hallucinatory screenprints. Yvonne Davis has used the intimacy of handwritten words alongside delicately coloured screenprints to describe the trauma of an abusive relationship. On Britas Lake and A River Walk by Michelle Rowley are atmospheric evocations of the artist’s emotional relationship to the exterior world, with a focus on the effects of light on water.
Tim’s Daly’s Returning Burton’s Plunder tells a different sort of story. With text taken from Howard Carter’s diary descriptions of the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, Daly has used the salt print process pioneered by Henry Fox Talbot to reproduce images taken at the site by Harry Burton. By leaving the photographs unfixed, Daly has created a set of images that gradually disappear upon exposure to the light. Each time the book is opened, the images fade – an act of inverse revelation, mirroring the plunder enacted by Carter and Burton a hundred years previously.
The success of Unfurled lies in the range of books it manages to assemble in such a small space. For many visitors, the idea of artists’ books will likely be an alien concept. What Unfurled reveals is that the concept of book – of artists’ books – is itself an illusion. Books can be made by anyone, can encompass any medium and can be used to explore the personal, the historical, the spiritual and the political. Books can have pages; they can be reassembled into sculptures or deconstructed completely. They exist simultaneously as gateways to other worlds and as things in their own right. They are, at once, object and idea – things to be marvelled at, touched, explored, enjoyed.
Unfurled: Encounters with Artists’ Books is open at the Grosvenor Museum, Chester until 2nd July 2023
Words, Hannah Harry