Artist's Book Yearbook 2003-2005 - Book Arts - University of the ...

The choice of artists went wider than those
represented by the Eagle Gallery and included
some who had made books before and others
for whom it was new territory. Writers were
approached in consultation with the artists and
a provisional list of collaborations went to
museums, research departments and collectors
with 10 subscribers copies of the books
available.
Spiritual Letters Andrew Bick and David Miller, 1997
Mr Krusoe’s Garden: I take breakfast at an Evil Hour
Pete Nevin, letterpress printed at Uhiselu,
Tallin, Estonia, 2002
98
The first book published under the EMH Arts
Publishers Scheme: And a year ago, I
commemorated a missed encounter was
brought out in 2000 and was a collaboration
between the painter Jane Bustin and the
curator and critic Andrew Renton. Bustin had
been working on a series of paintings which
took their titles from references in the poems
of Paul Celan. As an abstract artist she had
been much drawn to Celan's ability to fracture
and remake language in his attempt to find a
means to express the unsayable and was
exploring ways in her own work whereby she
could convey a range of associations and
emotional responses through very minimal,
process led paintings. The deep seated link
between word and image in the work made it
obvious material for a book but the approach
to making it and how or whether to reference
the source material had to be considered
carefully.
Andrew Renton accepted the invitation to write
a text and brought to the project a deep seated
knowledge and understanding of Celan's work.
He did not attempt to write in literal response
to the artist's paintings though he requested
to borrow individual works to have around him
over a period of approximately six months.
Renton's text when it was finished was
remarkable. He had managed to combine
reference with suggestion and had written a
piece that while ostensibly was about the act of
writing drew in threads of memory, sensation
and potential.
Celan said that his poetry was written towards
the moment of "becoming Silent" and this
sense of constructing a work that would be as
much about absence as presence became the
dominant principle in deciding how to make
the book. Bustin had made two aquatints -
pools of colour, latticed with a trace of an
etched plate, that were to be printed on
unbound, folded pages. The resonance of
the images on the paper was overt, almost
sculptural, as the saturated ink bled into the
bite of the etched line. It became apparent that
in order to reinforce the sense of what was not
present we should run a blank plate on the
opposite page so that the spread became a
diptych, empty and full. The text had been
written with a series of commentaries and was