So I feel with all this Eco Dyeing I haven’t been thinking very deeply. Only surface deep infact. So let’s try getting the cogs turning again.
A while back I attended the opening of the Qld regional art awards at the Qld State Library. Part of the event was a public forum on public art. (I hadn’t realised this was up first and so had to let Matt head home.)
Made note of something the moderator said. (On my phone as I couldn’t find my pen. Which by the way, turned up inside my journal 3 weeks later, shows just how fat my journals are!)
“We take texts personally” – we read them as a conversation with us. A month or so earlier, at a visit to the Artist Book Collection, also at the State Library, I had asked if an installation could be classed as an Artists Book. The answer had been that yes, if it included an up close and personal experience, in the vein of reading and turning pages it could. So again it is that personal interaction. This would make “Record Room” an artists book which fills an entire room…
I won’t include “Archive” even though it did include text and the personal interaction ( opening the boxes for viewing) as a 3 room Artists Book would be pushing it, even using the ” it’s an Artists Book if the artist says it is” excuse.
So back to thinking… I discovered the most wonderful book while wandering recently. My Book Joy had all but gone post-Borders so was rather nice to rediscover it. The book in question was “An Extrordinary Theory of Objects” by Stephanie LaCava.
“The unsuccessful transplant [ from the US to France] began one April in the early nineties. Everything that represented my past life and its predictable ways – my geode collection, a jar of shells from summers in Cape Cod, a box of empty cicada skins – had been packed and placed on a containership slowly crossing the Atlantic, I arrived with my mother and my brother, Zach, two months ahead of our belongings, and for that time I slept on a cot and wore the same shirt and pants every day to school. I started to obsess over my missing objects as evidence of what I’d lost. All I wanted was something to look forward to, … and to capture and tame the forces that caused this change. So, I started a new collection.”
I do love it when you open a book and find a quote which speaks to you directly at the moment. Back to that initial observation that we take texts personally. And another delicious quote from Stephanie:
“I traffic the world using my idiosyncratic senses, so it follows that I’d document my life through a narrative illuminated with objects and their respective stories.”
This thinking was next fed by an introduction to foldeded books, but that’s next time.