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

Making Books
Emma Hill
Moving house two years ago, I counted sixteen
boxes that contained my books. I have books
from four generations of my family. Books I
have re-read at intervals throughout my life and
other books I will probably never read but keep
because they have become in some way familiar.
As Calvino understands you can read a person's
life by looking at their books, they represent
the past and are held, with unknown potential,
for the future.
I make books because I think books are
important. When you take a book into your
hands you are taken on a journey that leaves
you somewhere different from where you
started. I make artists’ books because they can
contain more than one creative language in a
structure that holds time. I make books for the
same reason I imagine most people are drawn
to making them, because they are satisfying to
make.
As a publisher of books which bring together
the work of contemporary artists and writers
one enters interesting but problematic
territory. The experience of a book is generally
a private one, a subjective gathering of images
in the mind to visualise the words we read, fluid
and individual to each reader. A work which
attempts to ‘make visual’ words, to create visual
narrative, or to play conceptually upon the
'bookness' of itself, is by nature a hybrid thing
and risks overloading the space where what you
see or read becomes real in the mind's eye.
Good artists' books are never merely illustrative.
The best of them integrate formal qualities to
create “harmony among our various modes of
perception...” 1 - the intangible effect all good
art has to provoke a sense of recognition, even
in the first glance.
A book comes with a certain set of rules which
can be utilised or broken and I am less
interested in debating what an artist's book is
than in finding out what an artist's book can be.
I am encouraged by the view that “a book is a
space for imaginative action” 2 - a particular
kind of site where an artist can use what we
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understand about how a book holds language
to make us pause, contemplate and look anew.
Over the last ten years I have published books
which range from unique objects to limited
run, hand printed books to long-run
commercially printed editions. The only
defining feature of the imprint is that it brings
together words with images and in most
instances words which have been written
contemporaneously with the making of the
images. Early books tended to be made as a
record of temporary installations at the Eagle
Gallery and were simple letterpress, block print
or litho publications. The gallery is situated in
an area of London traditionally associated with
printing and in the early 90’s still had a
working community of small scale commercial
print workshops, which made printing the
books financially possible.
In 1992 Bruce McLean and Mel Gooding’s
Knife Edge Texts brought together the writing
from their previous collaborations in a simple
board bound book printed entirely in letterpress
by Tom Shaw. McLean liked the
utilitarian feel of the blank billboard covers and
incorporated a line of the books on the wall of
the installation Knife Edge at the Eagle: Another
Situation: No Style. Having a gallery it seemed to
make sense to show books in the same way as
we showed other art works and to present them
in a context where they were not an adjunct to
the other objects but attendant to them. It was
important to make them accessible and
readable. I can't see the point of making a book
with text if the viewer can't read it and however
precious a book is, the experience of it as an
object is lost if contained in a glass case.
In 1995 I was approached by Terry Smith, who
was gaining recognition as an installation artist
and had recently made a number of
interventions in a group of Acme houses in the
east end of London which had been cleared to
make way for the M11 link road.
Smith’s work by then existed only as
documentation - sequences of mainly black and
white photographs which showed how he had
referenced the histories of these spaces in
simple, eloquent repetitions of architectural
details, cut directly into the walls.