MA fine art research festival

I am creating a publication for the MA Research Festival in November. While the making of this publication is still underway, I am including here a series of notes and images that demonstrate the process of its development.

First and foremost I felt that this publication should blur the boundaries between book and art object, while falling primarily into the latter category. There has long been precedent for this approach in artist books - conventions of bookbinding, text and image format, and even ‘readability’ are subverted.

Tillman Kaiser’s DAS GLEICHE, NUR ANDERS Artist Book / © Tillman Kaiser

Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer / © Jonathan Safran Foer

To make an unconventional publication falls within key areas of interest for my practice. Ideas about the visual language of function, affordances, tactility and materiality all lend themselves to this undertaking.

Below are a series of initial notes I made when thinking about what this publication might include, that I continue to revisit and reference as I continue to develop it:

-  book itself becomes a sculpture that is suggestive of function - some of its own and some incongruent

- book as an extension of practice, not pure documentation

-  scale factors into this object in the same way it does for all the objects that it might depict

-  with a corresponding ‘holder’ that matches and continues the line of suggestion?

-  page of nets to be ripped out and used? 

- tactility, fabrics, towels

-  POCKETS!!! 

-  Louise Bourgeois - Ode à l'Oubli

-  translucent/tracing paper pages, layering

-  pages with cut out holes

-  stacking layers of bookbinding card to form a structure

-  false affordances, features that imply a function but do not allow it

-  truly functional features: pockets, zips, etc. 

-  this sculpture will have an interesting added element as it will be seen as a book (and in the context of the research festival) people will expect to pick it up, touch it, investigate it; often in my other work there is an uncertainty around whether viewers feel they are “allowed” to touch and investigate it 

-  inserting pages of lorem ipsum; what else can ‘be’ lorem ipsum?

Test using a press to layer bookbinding card into 3D forms: a short hollow cylinder and a pocket.

Test binding a book of lined paper with a towel-fabric cover

As I continue to develop this work, I am also exploring paperback binding, file-binding and ways of incorporating fabric within the leaves. I am approaching the inclusion of images and text as part of a wider interest in the dialogue between the 2D and 3D within a singular sculptural object - considering elements like the boundaries of pages, the flattening of space and ideas about containment.

I am endeavouring to use this project as an opportunity to develop my practice’s existing concerns, in a way that explores a different side of making work public and communicating my research.

Uncredited author (2021). Books As Art Objects Engage In A More Tactile, Intimate Experience. [online] designandpaper.com. Available at: https://www.designandpaper.com/books-as-art-objects-engage-in-a-more-tactile-intimate-experience/ [Accessed 2025].