redex

CF + Owen Bullock, 2014

redex, 2014. Letterpress on Whitetrace. Edition of 160: 130 were printed for the Parenthesis 27 Deluxe Folio. 207 x 205, 4pp.

Longlisted for the 2015 Fremantle Arts Centre Print Award.

Owen and I, freshly minted doctoral candidates, both attended the 2014 Codex Australia Symposium in Melbourne, after which he wrote a long poem called ‘redex’ that cobbled together snatches of conversations and presentations, bookended by his flight in and out of the city. I wanted to produce a complex yet relatively easily-printed piece for the US fine press journal Parenthesis, so I asked Owen if I could adapt an arrangement of his poem.

With his approval, I edited the poem down and removed all the quotes from named theorists and anything that really anchored it to that time and place, leaving it airy and universal, but retaining his arrival and departure. I printed an edition of it on both sides of a single page fold of thin translucent paper so that the words on either side interacted with each other and formed new, sometimes strange combinations.

Bonnie Mak calls the page ‘an interface, standing at the centre of the complicated dynamic of intention and reception; … the material manifestation of an ongoing conversation between designer and reader,’ (2011: 21) and this page fold format turned out to be just that. It demands to be physically handled, turned around and around to read. Like a conventional book, this work is impossible to display from one angle. It can’t be framed or pinned like a flat printed sheet. It is hard to photograph. Like a book, it has narrative, and visual movement. I have come to regard this print as an artist book in its own right, and I have subsequently shown it in book exhibitions.