Beyond Words

How To Say I Love You In Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet will be on display in the exhibition Beyond Words: Artists and Translation at Amelie Gallery in Beijing. The exhibition opens on 15 November and continues until 20 December, after which it will tour in the Asia Pacific region.

The London Art Book Fair

How To Say 'I Love You' In Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet 

was represented by KALEID Editions at The London Art Book Fair at the Whitechapel Gallery earlier this month. The image below shows my book surrounded by book works by artists including Tamarin Norwood, Victoria Browne and Rose Smith. 

The Birgit Skiöld Award for Excellence was awarded to 

How To Say 'I Love You' In Greenlandic during the fair. As a result of the award, the book has been acquired by the Victoria & Albert Museum. The award was presented by Elizabeth James, Senior Librarian in the V&A's Word and Image Department.

UDKANT, made in collaboration with Mette Sofie D. Ambeck

during my residency at Doverodde Book Arts Center Denmark, 

was acquired by the Tate Gallery, London.

Hot Metal and Frozen Paper

Next week I'll be in Dundee, origin and last resting place of the Discovery, the ship on which Robert Falcon Scott and his companions sailed for their ill-fated Antarctic expedition.

But I will be talking about printing at the other end of the earth... I'm due to present a paper at IMPACT 8, the biennial print conference that this time around will take as its theme 'Borders & Crossings: The Artist As Explorer'. How could I resist?

Here's the abstract for my paper, for those of you who can't make the conference. 

Hot Metal And Frozen Paper: Printing in Arctic Greenland 

And if the sun had not erased the tracks upon the ice,

they would tell us of the polar bears and the men who caught them.

(Obituary of a great Inuit hunter, 19th Century)

In 2010 Nancy Campbell travelled to the most northern museum in the world – Upernavik Museum in Greenland. Her residency resulted in an extensive body of graphic work on the vanishing languages and landscapes of the Arctic, including three limited-edition artists’ books: How To Say ‘I Love You’ In Greenlandic (Bird Editions) and The Night Hunter and Tikilluarit (Z’roah Press).


Historically the Inuit ‘read’ tracks on the ice rather than marks on paper. But Arctic explorers brought a new form of communication – the book – to Greenland’s shores. Nancy will briefly trace the history of the printing press in Greenland since its introduction in the late eighteenth century, addressing the difficulty of printing in remote and extreme conditions, the problems of representing new languages using old alphabets, and the reception of early printed material by the indigenous population.


Is there any possible dialogue between the printmaker, with her desire for permanent marks on paper, and the historical hunter, with his reverence for temporal tracks upon the ice? Nancy will discuss the challenges of using different print processes (letterpress, pochoir, screen print) to respond to an oral culture that has traditionally seen print media as part of an unwelcome colonial heritage. She will demonstrate how the disappearing Arctic environment informed the design choices behind How To Say ‘I Love You’ In Greenlandic and The Night Hunter, and how the print processes and the form of these books address issues of environmental and cultural extinction.

KALEID 2013 LONDON

How To Say 'I Love You' In Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet was selected by an international jury for representation by KALEID 2013 LONDON. The book was one of 50 ‘best artists’ books’ exhibited at the launch event at the Art Academy in July (pictured). I am delighted to announce that it will go on to be one of the 15 titles represented by KALEID EDITIONS at The London Art Book Fair at the Whitechapel Gallery on 13-15 September 2013.

KALEID 2013 LONDON

KALEID 2013 London will showcase the best of artists' books to an international audience of collectors. KALEID editions works closely with librarians, private book dealers and individual collectors, to advocate public special collections and promote artists' books as an interdisciplinary activity.

I'm delighted that How To Say 'I Love You' In Greenlandic has been selected from over 200 submissions for KALEID 2013 London. KALEID editions will be exhibiting book works from Spain, UK, Ireland, Norway, France, Germany, Italy, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland and Norway. This prestigious annual event, established in 2011, is an opportunity for creative practitioners and invited collectors to view singular book works. The international jury comprised Sofie Dederen (Frans Masereel Centrum for Print, Belgium), Elizabeth James (Word and & Image Department, National Art Library, V&A Museum, UK) and David Senior (MoMA Library, USA).

KALEID welcomes visitors to the public event on Saturday 20th July. Follow this year's progress on #KALEID2013London.

Awards and acquisitions will be held during a private event on Friday 19th July, supported by The Art Academy, Frans Masereel Centrum, the British National Art Library and English Arts Council’s Saison Poetry Library. 

A selection of twenty five books will be represented by KALEID editions during The London Art Book Fair at The Whitechapel Gallery, 13-15 September 2013.

In Eco-Nomy

My thanks to Azure Wang, a journalist based in Shanghai, for  this feature on 

How To Say 'I Love You' In Greenlandic in the magazine Eco-Nomy. 

A Swiss-Greenlandic Evening

I'm delighted that the Swiss writing collective AJAR (Association des jeunes auteurs romands) will be performing written responses to my book How To Say 'I Love You' In Greenlandic in Brighton next month. In Notre Glace En Mots, a bilingual literary event at ONCA Gallery, eleven young authors read new poems inspired by Greenlandic words, share neologisms and tell stories about melting ice and Arctic colonialism. Full details can be found here.

China Dialogue

Earlier this month I was interviewed by journalist Corinne Purtill for China Dialogue, a lively online news platform 'devoted to the publication of high quality, bilingual information, direct dialogue and the search for solutions to shared environmental challenges'.  Read her feature on How To Say 'I Love You' In Greenlandic here.

A Small Betrayal

Today I jumped ship to write about the Greenlandic language for the Huffington Post.
You can read it here.

How To Say 'I Love You' In Greenlandic at Bookartbookshop, London

Thanks to everyone who came along to the private view of my exhibition in the window of Bookartbookshop on Friday night. It was wonderful to see so many old friends and meet new ones.

Anna served canapés inspired by How To Say 'I Love You' In Greenlandic. The onigiri - or Japanese rice balls - looked like snowballs with colourful fillings. The Greenlandic language doesn't appear to have a word for 'rice ball' but I was pleased to find an equivalent so that we could provide a Greenlandic menu, with translations for the English-speakers present.

The exhibition continues until 29 November, to be followed by a new work by Tom Phillips, creator of A Humument, the altered book to end all altered books. Phillips' work has featured in some of my recent workshops, and I'm excited to see what he does next with the book form.

How To Say I Love You In Greenlandic at Bookartbookshop

I'm delighted to be exhibiting How To Say 'I Love You' In Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet at London's wonderful Bookartbookshop. Readers who have yet to visit this cavern of bibliographic enchantments can feast their eyes on the panoramic view of the shop floor, below. 



The exhibition will open on Friday 16 November and runs until 29 November. 

There is a Private View on Friday 16 November from 18.oo - 22.00, during which copies of How To Say 'I Love You' In Greenlandic will be on sale, and a range of Greenlandic greeting cards will be launched. Refreshments inspired by the Arctic landscape will be served.

There will be an artist's talk and group discussion on the subject of Geopoetics and Artists Books on Wednesday 21st November from 1800. This is a free event but numbers are limited so please contact the gallery to book your place.

Location details below. Please check shop opening hours before your visit.

Books in America

Illustration from A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain (unidentified artist)

How To Say ‘I Love You’ in Greenlandic is currently on show at The Center for Book Arts, New York, in the exhibition Tell Me How You REALLY Feel: Diaristic Tendencies, curated by Alexander Campos, Executive Director, and the artist Rory Golden (until 22nd September). It has just been announced that the exhibition will then travel to Payne Gallery at Moravian College Pennsylvania, where it will be on show until the end of the year.

Doverodde has been selected for the exhibition Sense of Place in Artist Books at the Architecture and Landscape Library Gallery, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, curated by Karen Kinoshita (also on show until the close of 2012). The exhibition is part of Mapping Spectral Traces which serves to mediate and facilitate inter- and trans-disciplinary international dialogue to explore the role of the visual and performing arts in addressing such relevant concerns as ecological activism, ‘deep mapping’, place-based memory work, trauma, postcolonial geographies and related topics. 

Back in the saddle

I took a break from blogging last month after the epic effort of posting daily as part of my spring residency at Doverodde Book Arts Center in Denmark. Here's a round-up of what's been brewing during June.

How To Say 'I Love You' In Greenlandic

This evening the summer exhibitions open at The New York Center for Book Arts. There's a free drinks reception at 7pm - do go along if you're in the area. 

This year offers two great shows - Maria G. Pisano, founder of Memory Press, curates Book as Witness: The Artist’s Response. The artists, who use the book form to investigate death and destruction as a result of global conflicts, prejudice, terrorism, natural disasters, and individual losses, include Booklyn Artists Alliance, Combat Papermakers, Maureen Cummins and Art Spiegelman. 

Tell Me How You REALLY Feel: Diaristic Tendencies, organised by Alexander Campos, Executive Director, and the artist Rory Golden, focuses on artwork that has been inspired by the concept or content of graphic novels, memoirs, and travel journals with a strong visual presence. How To Say 'I Love You' In Greenlandic will be featured. The definitions of Greenlandic words that can apply to both the emotions and the landscape do indeed Tell Me How You REALLY Feel. The pochoir prints depicting icebergs which illustrate the book reference the recurrent use of the iceberg as a motif for the inexpressible sublime in illustrations to nineteenth-century Arctic travel narratives. 

Both shows run at the Center from July 11, 2012  to September 22, 2012.

Miriam Macgregor in her kitchen

Anyone interested in pochoir prints and hoping to find out more can read my interview with the grande dame of pochoir, Miriam Macgregor, in the Summer Issue of Printmaking Today. Last November I spent a week in the New Forest with Miriam and the American wood engraver Abigail Rorer, writing and sketching during the day, talking long into the evening. Miriam began pochoir in her sixties after a life of wood engraving, and her excitement in the process and sense of its possibilities are an inspiration.

The Night Hunter

The compendium 1,000 Artists' Books: Exploring the Book as Art has been some time in the making: it's a lot of artists' books to round up. Edited by Sandra Salamony, with advice from those wonderful artists Peter and Donna Thomas, it is now out from Quarry Books. I am delighted to see the work of many friends included, and interested to discover some artists whose work is new to me. Roni Gross of Z'roah Press has several book works included and The Night Hunter is one of them!

Watch this space for a companion volume to The Night Hunter in which Roni Gross responds to my poem The Hunter Teaches Me to Speak, currently in production as part of the Al-Mutanabbi Street project. 


DOVERODDE 

My exhibition Limfjord Lines has now come down after a month in the Doverodde Book Arts Center. However,  DOVERODDE, the book inspired by my residency is now on sale in the Center's shop, and sales via the internet are cheering. This was my first experiment with print-on-demand provider Blurb and although it is a very different aesthetic to letterpress I am pleased with the results.  

The book has been selected for the exhibition Sense of Place in Artists' Books, curated by Karen Kinoshita, which runs from October to December 2012 at the Architecture Library, University of Minnesota. 

Images of the Doverodde Book Arts Festival, including Arne Holstborg's raucous woven hearts workshop which brought proceedings to a close, are now up on Flickr

Bookbinding Now

During my trip to New York in October I chatted with Susan Mills in an interview recorded for her Bookbinding Now podcast series. This interview has just been made available here and can also be downloaded through iTunes.

Bookbinding Now is a great series featuring a different book artist every fortnight. I've listened to earlier podcasts to while away the hours spent sewing or making pochoir prints. Scroll down through the podcasts to find my particular favourite: Barbara Mauriello talking about the early days of The New York Center for Book Arts - when the studio was so chilly you had to wear gloves to set type.

Thank you Susan for giving up your time to keep us entertained in our studios!

The Mystery Is Solved

How To Say 'I Love You' In Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet opens with a description of a card game. I had forgotten (if I ever knew) its name - and no one, not even the V&A Museum of Childhood, could enlighten me. This was discouraging, but I decided to write about the game regardless of my ignorance - after all, the whole book is about verbal loss.

There is a card game which differs from pelmanism in that every card is different and from solitaire in that there can never be a conclusion to it. As a child I was given a shabby nineteenth-century deck; down the generations the packaging had been lost and the cards were held together with a rubber band of comparable antiquity. Lacking its original case and any rulebook, to this day I have been unable to discover its name, or whether I played it as the maker intended.

The fifty cards, slim and furred with age, depicted not hearts, clubs, spades and diamonds but whimsical landscapes. One showed a magnificent medieval fortress; another, boats on a lake bordered by palm trees; and still others, sublime mountain ranges. Yet whatever the scenery, there was always a road on the horizon, along which a tiny carriage was driving.

These views were not self-contained vignettes. I could join each card to any other, because, however unpredictable the inclines and settlements at the centre, the road reached the edges at the same point on every one. Aligning these extravagant geographies, I made a cardboard continent. The passengers in the little carriage can scarcely have felt a jolt as they crossed from Alpine pass to desert dune; however far they travelled, they never had to fear dropping over a precipice or reaching a closed border, for there was always a card in my hand, ready to lay down to prevent their vehicle rolling into annihilation.

And, sure enough, there the carriage was, pictured on the next card.

To my delight, the game has now been identified. One of the guests at my reading at Florisity in New York last week had also played it as a child, and her subsequent research revealed it to be commonly known as a myriorama. This link offers an opportunity to play a reduced version of the game; both it, and the image above, are courtesy of the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture at Exeter University.

You can buy a modern reproduction of the game for only £3.25 (+p&p) from www.toypost.co.uk. Or you could put the money towards a copy of How To Say 'I Love You' In Greenlandic.

The Night Hunter in New York

The launch of The Night Hunter and How to say 'I love you' in Greenlandic in the United States was a double-bill of Arctic-themed events hosted by The New York Center for Book Arts and Florisity (see pictures below).

Between the festivities I saw a solo exhibition of sculptures by Peter Schell, one half of the creative team behind The Night Hunter. The purity of these forms reminds me of layers of glacial ice, although they were begun long before our Greenlandic collaboration.

Emily Martin was also in the city celebrating her solo exhibit Theme and Variation at The Center for Book Arts. We made cookies to serve at the private view iced with her trademark stick figures from the 'Crime and Romance' series. Emily's show continues until 3 December. It would be criminal to miss it.

Theme and Variation at The New York Center for Book Arts

Emily Martin working with icing bag

Emily Martin's work also features in the exhibition The Book As Memorial: Book Artists Respond To and Remember 9/11 at the Haas Family Arts Library at Yale University. The library has also added both The Night Hunter and How to say 'I love you' in Greenlandic to its collections.

Thanks are due to the New York Room With A View establishment by the waterfront on Staten Island, which provided a place to sleep in between all these activities.

The Night Hunter:

Book Arts Lounge at The New York Center for Book Arts

7th October 2011

Roni Gross (proprietor of Z'roah Press) demonstrates how to print on the Vandercook

Participants take turns to print flashcards with words from How to say 'I love you' in Greenlandic.

On the left, bookbinder Ana Cordeiro, who made the box that houses the deluxe edition of The Night Hunter, welcomes me back to The Center for Book Arts after a three-year absence. It was good to find Natalie McGrorty (in purple) in town too.

Reception and Book Launch at Florisity

16th October 2011

The Night Hunter

Roni Gross's flower arrangements referenced polar themes

How to say 'I love you' in Greenlandic

Thanks to Sarah Nicholls, Roni Gross and Emily Martin for the photographs used in this post.

New York Book Launch Double Bill

A Dealer On Either Side of the Pond

The launch of How to Say 'I love you' in Greenlandic was celebrated at The Poetry Society in London on 22 September. The edition is now available for sale. Bookselling is a slow business, so I am very grateful to two venerable dealers in fine press and illustrated books for adopting my book and sharing the dirty work with me.

In the UK, my Arctic alphabet can be found on the shelves of Collinge & Clark, just down the road from the British Library in London. Oliver Clark has featured the book on his sparkling new website, which offers the undisciplined browser an endless distraction of paper delights. Customers can sign up for the erudite newsletter and benefit from 10% discount on all current stock. Collinge & Clark have been providing bibliophiles with works on printing and typography since 1989, but the shop (above) will be best known to many as the set for cult comedy Black Books.

I'm delighted that the work has also been featured in Catalogue 70 from The Veatchs, also specialists in the history of the book. Bob and Lynne Veatch's shop in Northampton, Massachusetts, stocks examples of book-making from all periods, early and modern fine printing, historical and publishers' bindings, and designer bindings. Catalogue 70 focuses on the genre of the alphabet book - the compilation is 'a fabulist's wishlist' (Maureen Cummins), with alphabets ranging from Aphid to Zebra (Beo Press), Aqueduct to Urinal (Parrot Press) and - for the more arcane - a set of Ohgam characters by Eileen Hogan. I hope a few American collectors will find their way to the Arctic through the Veatchs' doors.

Illustration

The summer issue of Illustration is full of drama. It appears that the Pre-Raphaelite illustrator formerly known as Florence Harrison was not the true Florence Harrison at all, and that there were hidden depths to two of the earliest illustrators of Pickwick Papers, Robert Seymour and Robert William Buss. While Oliver Messel’s reputation rests primarily on stage design, his distinctive illustrative work is no less entertaining. There's also a reconsideration of the work of Thomas Bewick prompted by Nigel Tattersfield's monumental new study. At the contemporary end of the spectrum, look out for 'Letters from the Arctic', a feature on How to say 'I love you' in Greenlandic.

The magazine can be found at a number of venues including the British Library and Tate Britain bookshops; the feature on How to say 'I love you' in Greenlandic can also be accessed online, thanks to Cambridge University.

Canapes in Cambridge

Is there a collective noun for icebergs? I am casting around for one worthy of the silver platters of edible icebergs which appeared in Cambridge on Thursday evening. The canapes, made from frangipan - yellow raspberries - cucumber - white asparagus - shrimp - sea salt pearls - and what appeared to be nothing less than gold dust itself - were the inspired creation of Jaqi Clayton-Church of CuisineJacqueline. Many thanks to Jaqi, the World Oral Literature Project and all at The Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities for making the preview of How to say 'I love you' in Greenlandic such a resounding success.