First Page

'The book' is sitting on a table in the next room, along with some scraps of blue thread I recently pulled from an indigo dyed kimono I was taking apart, a spool of red cotton thread, my new sharp snip like scissors, glue stick, crayons, pencil case and a large copper and bronze relief drawing on black velvet. The artwork is of a Phoenician ship. My parents brought it back with them from a trip to Lebanon in the 1970's. My mum and I were cleaning up a few months ago and she had all these relics in a box.

They were always in our formal living room, as I was growing up. I couldn't bare to see them go to the op shop (I probably would have gone & bought them back the next day) I have done that before. My mum donated a printed embroidery linen template (don't know their technical name) of The Last Supper, to Reverse Garbage (R.G.). It was my grandmother's, but she never stitched it. Months later, I kept coming across it as I did my usual rummaging in the piles of stuff at R.G. so finally I bought it back because I decided that I was meant to have it.

This is oddly all related to my book. I have Belinda's book, Herodotus ‘The Histories’. I started to read through it on my way home from Canberra a few weeks ago. Claire gave me the book at the Making Do 2 exhibition. So as Sally was doing her driving shift, I read to her. I was stumbling over all the names. The page I randomly chose made reference to the Phoenicians, Palestine, Syria and the Persians. I folded it in half and figured that was the first action in the artwork. However, two nights ago, when I sat down to seriously work on the book, for some reason, I unfolded that page again. So now I lost it, as it lost its kink.

This book was initially rather intimidating to get first. It's such a heavy (physically/conceptually) book. It has taken me a while to start working into it (approximately 16 days) and where did I start? The first page. The first line reads, "According to the Persians best informed in history, the Phoenicians began to quarrel." Going back to the first page I read from this book, I always find joy in historical references to Palestine. For our contemporary sources of information have managed to completely erase its existence.

As I searched "Phoenician ship" in an engine in between typing this, I opened a new browser, only to see the headline on The Guardian website,

Up to 150 kidnapped in Baghdad Gunmen kidnap scientists and staff from research institute.

We don't hear much about the regular assassinations of Iraq's university professors, intellectuals, philosophers, scientists, researchers, artists. It's been happening since May 2003 and continues more regularly. I only became aware of this after hearing Haifa Zangana speak at the Sydney Writer's Festival earlier this year. Her talk was entitled, "Death is Covering Us Like a Fine Dust."

I cannot escape the politics. I do not want to escape them. I think this book is a great first book. Maybe now I can feel more confident working into it.

Nicole

the book choices - Sinister Errand

My book is called 'Sinister Errand' a novel by Peter Cheyney. I found the book at the local CWA hall market in a holiday town on the North East coast of Tas called Bridport. Bridport is where my family have a holiday house and I chose this book because its the kind of book that one finds in shacks, the kind of book I never read or never think I have the time to read because that would mean being on holidays with nothing other to do than be inside reading an aged 1946 detective novel. (Needless to say, I haven't read the book!)

The book is old and brown, when I picked it up it seemed like a very basic functional book, one whose purpose is to tell a jolly good story, not a flashily designed, illustrated or colourful book, it had a sort of direct honesty about it. Dipping into it, I could tell there was a strong narrative in it, any page has, characters, action and situations described, these elements I thought might be good starting points to respond to. I'm also interested in 'graphic novels' and am only just beginning to look at them and I thought this sort of story could be a way to look more at that genre. The fact that it has no images at all appealed as then there's the possibility to really respond to the text, individual words or strings. Being a 1946 publication it feels like it could be a time capsule for all sorts of assumptions and social messages belonging to that era, for example, I couldn't help notice the way women and men were characterised in it, and that interests me.

Anyway they are my thoughts on what was an instinctive choice towards a book I would not usually buy or read.

(Marg)

the book choices - The Histories

I am sending you Herodotus ‘The Histories’ – unfortunately I could only find a copy bound together with another book but perhaps we can work around that. My main interest in this book is that it is used in ‘The English Patient’ (Michael Oonjadtie) as an artist book of sorts – the main character uses it as his journal on explorations in the African desert and pastes cigarette papers with small text in – images; photographs – writes in the margins etc. I touched on this idea in one of Ruth’s workshops a few years ago but never got the chance to follow through the idea so I hope this will be interesting for others too. There is a passage that speaks about mapping an internal landscape (idea from ‘The English Patient’ but not an exact quote). M.O.’s writing is poetry really.

(Belinda)

the book choices - graph paper pattern book

Background to my book. This is a book I found recently (but still before the project idea had surfaced) at Reverse Garbage. I have played with graph paper previously and have always been fascinated by the grid and structure. I liked this book even more because someone has plotted and planned their cross stitch patterns in it. I chose the book for this project because my initial vision was to send a novel, then i wanted to send an old photograph album (but was too heavy), so I thought this was the best choice as it is light weight, visual and still very interesting. The more I looked at it the more I realised that it was the right choice, as it has so much in it.

A little background on my interest in graph paper. I became conscious of it when looking at the video artwork by Mona Hatoum called "Measures of Distance". It is a video of her mother showering, Mona's voice over reading letters (in English) her mother had written her and the actual image of the letters her mother had written (in Arabic) layered over the shower image.

The paper used for the letter is a type of ruled paper, similar to graph paper. It is very common letter writing paper in Lebanon, it actually comes from school books that are made in France. From my understanding/assumption, the paper is to assist with writing the letters properly. I had a friend get me a couple of pads of writing paper a few years ago and now i actually use them to write in Arabic (something I didn't expect I would ever be able to do).

Without going on & on... this is what influenced my attraction to graph paper initially.

I think finding a rule is a very difficult thing to do! I do not want to be prescriptive about it. I guess I would like to see a sensitivity to the grid. I would also like to see as much of the patterns/drawings already in the book remain at the core, so they are not erased so much.

(Nicole)

the book choices - "Cool" How a kid should live

The book I've chosen is called '"Cool" How a kid should live'. It's a religious diary, day book or journal, targeted at children and first published in 1971. (This version is copyright 1974, so it may well have been published annually.) It is stylised in its design, with lots of very 70s design elements and a big range of illustrations. There is at least one page allocated for each day of the year, and each day embraces a different religious proverb or moral. This includes an overarching phrase which is spelt out in greater detail using content from 'The Living Bible'.

This was the first book I came across when I started considering options for the project. I was attracted to the unusual design and strong 70s feel of it. The aspect of the incomplete journal is also interesting. But I'm also repelled by the religious content. I'm a fairly resolute aetheist with no strong religious interests. I'm pretty wary about taking on any religious issues in my creative work - it's not something that interests me enough to make 'statements' about. So... there's lots to this one for me, and I'm interested in teasing it all out!

As far as a guideline goes, I would like us to consider the 'purpose' and confines of this particular book. In particular, I think we could be guided by its introduction, which states:

At the bottom of every page there are blank lines. Use these spaces for:
--a record of God's special word to you that day
--a diary
--prayer requests
--birthday reminders or special events in your life

It's a cool life - when you live it the way God wants you to.

I think that these notions of record-keeping, journalling etc. can be explored in innumerable ways and I'm really looking forward to seeing everyone's interpretations. Throw in prayer and religion and who knows where we might end up!

(Claire)

the book choices - Ghost to Houston

My book (the name of which i can't remember) is part of a children's encyclopaedia, and what i do remember of its title is that it is the section from 'Ghost to Houston' (G-H)... I found it in the opp shop in Gerringong, and what i like about it is the coloured illustrations which are drawings. I thought it would be interesting to have a book in the collection that was more images than text. Like most of us (it seems) i don't have any specific rules to suggest in relation to the book, but chose it thinking that the combination of 'information' and graphic images might provide some interesting starting points. Overall the images are the main event from my perspective, so perhaps we could focus on that side of things. It would give us a chance to 'draw', whatever that may mean to each of us. I've been thinking a lot about drawing over the last year or so, and am curious about the breadth of possibilities, especially outside of standard conventions.

(Ruth)

the book project

Over lunch one day, Claire and Ruth came up with an idea for a collaborative project inspired by an artist’s book which we had been looking at (which Ruth found in the library at UOW after reading about it in another book). The book is called A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel, by Tom Phillips, (Thames and Hudson, 1980). Phillips took a second-hand book, the first book he found for the price he had decided to spend (choice by serendipity), and it happened to be a Victorian novel called A Human Document. Over some (presumably extensive) period of time he worked into the original book, drawing and painting into every single page, leaving just enough text visible to allow a thread of narrative, and in the end created a new illustrated book from it which incorporates graphic and poetic content. According to his website (www.humument.com) it can be seen as a defining product of post modernism, linking traditions as various as medieval illumination, experimental poetry and non-linear narrative with the procedures of modern art. One of the fascinating things about A Humument is that it is shelved amongst the Victorian novels, not in the art section of the library. So one could come across it accidentally, which would be a great surprise no doubt, if you were looking for Victorian novels…

Inspired by this, and by the book itself (which has some 300 or so artworks as every page has been approached as a discreet work in itself), we got a bit excited and thought it would fun to work on a project based on a similar idea. We thought it would be more interesting as a collaborative project, with several people involved and several books circulating. This would enable a number of approaches, more serendipity, and create an ongoing project to which we could all devote as much or as little time as we each have. Over lunch we came up with a bit of a structure for the project in the form of a set of rules (see below). We also thought it might be interesting to generate some specific rules for each book once we had seen them, as an informed response (see below). We also thought the project would work better if there weren’t too many people involved, so we came up with a short list of people we’d like to work with and are hoping you might all be interested in being involved.

Five participants
--Ruth
--Claire
--Nicole
--Marg
--Belinda

Five books
--One chosen by each participant
--Second-hand and inexpensive
--Not too big (considering potential postage costs)

A number of set terms
--Books to be rotated amongst the group until finished
--Each book is kept for 1 month at a time, before sending on to the next person
--Books rotated at the end of each calendar month (so we don’t forget…)
--The number of pages that you choose to rework during this period is up to you
--The order of the pages that you choose to rework during this period is also up to you
--Each page of each book must be treated in some way by the end of the project
--Treatment may include removal!
--The project will continue until all books are finished
--Copyright to be shared by all
--Each book is to be returned to its original owner, unless otherwise negotiated

A number of terms to be decided
In addition to the basic framework set out above, we can jointly determine a number of additional guidelines for each of the five books. We thought these could be set up during an initial rotation period, where each participant will have one of the books for one week (before passing them on) and suggest a guideline in response to it. Once all the books have circulated and each book has gained a set of (5) guidelines - one from each of us – we can begin working on the books. These rules might focus on content (poetic or textual), materials, techniques, approaches, or any other relevant aspect. They should aim to be sympathetic to the original artefact and to the project itself in order to inspire and inform the work, rather than confine it.

Our suggested timeframe
By 10 October: Let us know if you would like to participate
By 17 October: Select your book and mail it to Claire
By 20 October: We will organise the initial rotation of all five books

More information about the original artist’s book: A Humument
--Catalogued at 823.9/PHI if your library has a copy of the book
--The official website is: http://www.humument.com/
--Tom Phillips’ website: http://www.tomphillips.co.uk/
(Both these sites include extensive image galleries)

Other books on artists’ books:
--The Century of Artists’ Books, Johanna Drucker, 1994/2004, Granary Books, NY
--Guardare, Raccontare, Pensare, Conservare (Looking, Telling, Thinking, Collecting: four directions of the artist’s book from the Sixties to the present), curated by Anne Moeglin-Delcroix, Liliana Dematteis, Giorgio Maffei, Annalisa Rimmaudo, 2004, Edizioni Corraini, Italy

Please add to this list if you have any suggestions – it would be great to compile a number of references on artist’s books.