L OO P
CF for Book Art Object 5
Insta: @ampersandduck @bookartobject #baoedition5
Handset letterpress and mixed media on Stonehenge Black, Chinese papers and found maps. Hand-stitched dos-à-dos codex. Edition of 16. Text is taken from ‘Overwintering’, 2018: 26 poems by John Bennett, used with permission from the author.
WINNER, 2021 NORTHERN BEACHES LIBRARIES ACQUISITIVE AWARD (long video, they get there eventually)
SELECTED FOR THE 2020 LIBRIS AWARDS
SHOWN AT THE 2020 ABBE ARTIST BOOK FAIR
In the collections of the NLA, the Bibliotheca Librorum apud Artificem (Sydney) and the Northern Beaches Libraries. There are still copies available.
Book Art Object is like a book group for book artists. Each project uses a common text (with permission from the writer), and participants can use the text, rework the text or just bounce off the text. We break up into manageable groups, and make an edition that is swapped with our groups (and others if pre-arranged).
Original statement (Oct 2019)
L OO P is a book based on a poem about birds. There isn’t a bird in it. It is bereft of living things. There is a lot of frustration, fear and questioning. It is a book about the climate change emergency, pushing John Bennett’s quiet, polite worries into desperate territory. The books look battered because they are: the Chinese papers, pristine when I found them on a trip to Hangzhou, China, have been carried home in my luggage and through three house moves. They show their travel.
Visiting China in 2015 shook me to the core. Hangzhou is a domestic tourist destination. It is the ‘Willow Pattern Plate’ city, full of lakes, pagodas and willows. In 2016, the year after I visited as an international tourist, Hangzhou received 136,958,500 domestic tourists. The air is thick with smog. Everyone has to drink from plastic bottles as the local water is undrinkable. There are electronic signs at every tourist attraction giving live updates about tourism crowding and air pollution.
When I got home to Canberra, I almost kissed the ground gratefully: clear air, clean, drinkable water, wide open urban spaces interspersed with natural spaces. When I walk through a wide empty space, my retina still populates it with people. I have not used a plastic bottle since my trip, but while I recycle, reuse and try not to fly, I now feel like my efforts are worthless in the face of capitalist abuse of resources in the pursuit of profits and wealth. We say these things again and again: I am old enough to know how long we have been warned about climate change, and capitalism, but no-one pays attention. Things are going to loop and swirl until something major happens. I do not want to celebrate beauty. I want to weep in despair.
L OO P is the result of this feeling.
Addendum, 2020
Summer 2020 was when I couldn’t kiss the Canberra ground anymore. Stuck inside my hot sealed flat, using a hand-made air purifier (none in the shops), having to wear a P2 mask whenever I went outside. My region was full of toxic smoke from the unprecedented ferocity of the south coast and ACT bushfires. I had my emergency kit sitting by the door, and every day I checked about 5 apps to get the latest updates. L OO P now feels like a souvenir of this summer, even though it preceded it.
