The Blue Notebook, Volume 13, Number 1, Autumn-Winter 2018 / Edited by Sarah Bodman

Identifier:REF.SE.2378.19

Dimensions:8.125 x 11.75 in

Publication dates:2018

cover art by: Caren Florance, Angela Gardner

Description:Published October 2018. Curated by Caren Florance, University of Canberra, this issue draws upon a symposium called Poetry and the Artist Book, which was held at the University of Canberra (UC), Canberra, Australia, in April 2017. Organised as a component of the assessment process of her practice-led PhD, the symposium featured Caren Florance, two of the assessment panel members, Lisa Samuels (University of Auckland, NZ), and Susan Wood (Charles Sturt University, Wagga), along with UC colleague, Monica Carroll, and her initial supervisor from the first year of doctoral study at Monash University, artist Marian Crawford. The missing panel member, Paul Uhlmann (Edith Cowan University, Perth), was not able to get to the symposium, joining the panel the next day to experience her graduating exhibition, Reading Spaces. This issue is a brief reflection of the outcomes.

Marian Crawford is a printmaker who has always worked with poets in her artist books but had not spent much time around the academic poetry community. Her presence at the symposium built some new relationships, and highlighted the Venn space between artist books and poetic approaches to book space. Her paper, Invented people who never existed (Javier Marias 2016): printmaking and the ghosts of letterpress, is steeped in the poetics of the letterpress process and its material contribution to the creation of contemporary books.

Susan Wood is an artist who works with textile and printmaking processes: embroidery, quilting, collage and letterpress, to make objects and books. Her work often reworks stories and recycles materials, and her reflections here look at the concept of reciprocity as an ethical creative practice. She hooks onto my doctoral questioning of the use of poetry as source material for artists’ books and explores it for herself.

All of the three sets of artist pages in this issue have relationships with the symposium and my research. Writer Monica Carroll fills the gap left by Lisa Samuels by sharing four pages from her own doctoral thesis. An exploration of the philosophy of Phenomenology, each assessor’s version of Monica’s thesis was an individual work, not a reproduced copy of her research. They are unique manuscripts, with hand-stitching through the pages and exercises for the assessors (which sometimes meant responding to instructions to interact with pages by cutting, drawing and other interactions). After assessment, each copy was reluctantly returned, to form a deeply material collection of her research outcomes. Monica is now an artist’s book researcher, having made the connection that she is, to the core, an artist’s book maker.

Paul Uhlmann has contributed images of himself wrangling his latest artist book. As a graduate of Canberra’s iconic Graphic Investigation Workshop, poetry and poetics are a natural component of his creative practice.

Nicci Haynes (ANU School of Art + Design) started working with poet Angela Gardner when I introduced them during one of our working sessions for my doctoral work. Canberra is a small city, and one of the joys of working at two campuses is the chance to cross-pollinate artists and poets. Nicci’s work is deliberately absurd and chaotic, dedicated to asking real questions, like ‘what does this actually mean?’

Cover, badge and sticker designs: Caren Florance & Angela Gardner.