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

Guest Post: Andrew Lee on Asparagus

I was in South Cornwall recently. This little gem of a shop serves the local communities of Par, Tywardreath and St Blazey. (My friend Eve will laugh if she reads this, but I was never sure where I was in this conurbation!) I went in asking where the Post Office was and bought some sweet williams and fat asparagus. Although I never went back for any of the tempting produce advertised here, maybe next time?

 

Andrew Lee

Andrew Lee is an artist whose work has featured previously on these pages. And there's more on his website.

New Publication: Doverodde

Doverodde

Twenty short prose pieces about the harbour village of  Doverodde in Denmark, 

illustrated with photographs.

Bird Editions, Oxford, 2012.

Softcover: £12.95

Available to preview and purchase here.

* * * 

Doverodde shelters in an oxbow on the Limfjord, a glacial channel separating North Jutland from mainland Denmark. Nancy Campbell was Writer-in-Residence in Doverodde during the month leading up to the Doverodde Book Arts Festival in May 2012. The location lay behind the choice of theme for the Festival: On The Margins (or 'Udkant' in Danish).

'Despite the relative isolation of Doverodde, there was always something happening to justify walking away from my studio for a few moments – a boat launch, a flower market, a disagreement between dogs. Alongside work on poems about the region's geology and waterways, I began to collect notes about my everyday experiences in the village. These sketches developed into short prose pieces, published daily on my website for the entertainment of Doverodde’s residents and more distant friends. This selection from those writings provides a dose of life on the margins of Denmark.'

Limfjord Lines

During April and May 2012 I was writer-in-residence at the Book Arts Center at the Limfjordscentret, located in a historic merchant’s building by the Limfjord in North Jutland, Denmark. This month-long residency culminated in the Doverodde Book Arts Festival IV and Symposium.

Limfjord Lines, an exhibition of my work about the region, will run in the Doverodde Købmandsgård Gallery from 22 May until 24 June 2012. Doverodde, a new publication containing writing from the residency, is also available.

Farewell to Doverodde

 Mors seen from Doverodde at dusk

This month in Doverodde has been rich in experiences and highly productive. I intend to return to the Limfjord in years to come, both in order to continue work on themes suggested by this residency, and also to initiate new projects. 



I've found daily posting a rewarding challenge. The posts are scribbled down in the time around work on Limfjord Lines, the poetry installation I am preparing for exhibition in the Limfjordcenter. Sometimes the posts are not finished to my satisfaction, and I know that sitting on them for a day or two would improve them, but I have to click 'publish' if I'm to keep to my promise. The blog is a great platform for sifting ideas. Sometimes I start writing the day's post - on the creature in the tower for example, or the seagull and the iron age barrow, or the sick child's island - to find it grows longer and longer, and those writings have developed in other directions. (Of course, then I need to find something else to slot into the day's diary.) Some experiences  I sought out hoping they would make interesting posts, such as the trip to Mors on the ferry, but they have become poems instead.

This week my solitude was exchanged for conviviality when a congress of artists arrived in Doverodde for the Book Arts Festival. I'm sure fragments of this landscape will reappear in their work too.


Limfjord Lines will run in the Doverodde Købmandsgård Gallery from 22 May until 24 June 2012.

Doverodde Diary: Day 22 (Sunday Special) - Black Sheep

This week Doverodde Diary’s World of Exteriors Sunday Special brings you an art world exclusive. Never before have works by anonymous guerrilla artist ‘Black Sheep’ been seen in the press.

Black Sheep was nowhere to be seen

There are many sheep in the gently rolling hills around Doverodde, but one is a prodigy. ‘Black Sheep’ (whose true identity remains a mystery even to our intrepid reporter) visits the village by night, leaving intricate crocheted works on drainpipes, handrails and even around the trees.

We believe Black Sheep be a native of the Thy region, for each work responds with subtlety to the colours and textures of its surroundings. 

These works bring flowers where there were none, and cover rude metal in woolen moss and bare bark with cotton lichen. 

A fringe of ivy leaves blows from a hydrant

Some works (below) have been spotted within buildings, indicating that as well as possessing a far from sheepish stealth, Black Sheep may have leanings towards cat-burglary.

Our resident art critic suggests that this may be a self-portrait. It is certainly far from unlikely that it displays an element of the sympathy felt by one four-legged creature for another.

Let us hope that Black Sheep will be a bellweather for textile arts in Doverodde, and maybe even further afield.

Editor's Note: We are pleased to report that last week's feature on Woodpiles has inspired our colleagues in Wales to file a related feature. We look forward to further updates from our loyal readers on marginal woodpiles worldwide.

Doverodde Diary: Day 21 - For The Dogs