Summer Exhibitions: Brighton, New York, London

I will be showing work in Making Tracks, the summer exhibition at The ONCA Gallery, Brighton. Earlier this year I was commissioned by artist Pete Lally to write a poem for his Suitcase Library, a collection of miniature books. My poem 'Obituary' is now available as one of the letterpress-printed library titles, which will be on display at ONCA.

'Obituary' will be shown alongside The Night Hunter - the artists' book designed and executed by Roni Gross and Peter Schell in response to my poem of the same title.

Meanwhile the latest book from Z'roah Press, Tikilluarit (Roni Gross's imaginative setting of my poem 'The Hunter Teaches Me To Speak') will be exhibited at Poet's House in New York as part of Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, a group show of artists' responses to violence in Iraq. Tikilluarit, a recent finalist in the MCBA Prize, is currently on show at The Cambridge Arts Council, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Finally, How To Say I Love You In Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet has been selected for KALEID 2013 London. The chosen books will be on show to the public at The Art Academy on Saturday 20th July 2013. The book will also be part of group exhibitions in Beijing and New Zealand during the autumn and winter: watch this space.

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

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

News from New York

The Night Hunter

Roni Gross - a longtime friend and more recently collaborator - has put up some amazing images of recent work on her website. Here you can see a generous spread of the Zitouna offerings that Gross has printed biannually for Valentine's Day and Hallowe'en since 1989. To me, who only gets around to making a Christmas card every other year, this output seems phenomenal. Especially when the rest of Gross' work is taken into account. More of that here, too: a selection of poetry broadsides, and for those curious to see more images of The Night Hunter than have appeared on this blog to date, there's a slideshow of sorts, with the artist's commentary.

A New Publication - The Night Hunter

Without any doubt the most exciting project I’ve participated in over the last year has been The Night Hunter, a work now available from Z’roah Press in New York. Roni Gross, book artist and founder of Z’roah, produces limited edition artists’ books with the sculptor Peter Schell. Gross spotted my poem ‘The Night Hunter’ when it was awarded a prize at the Norman MacCaig Centenery celebrations last year. It is an honour to be added to Z’roah’s panoply of poetic works, which includes the exquisite Radiance and Repose by Geri Gomez Pearlberg.

It has been intriguing to see my work taking on a new imaginative form. Explaining the design decisions, Gross writes:

‘The structure of the book, a palm leaf, is of east asian origin, as is the form of the poem, a pantoum. The requirements of the pantoum are that the lines repeat in a specific pattern. We felt that the reader could be cued into this pattern visually, using drawn lines whose colors repeat as the language repeats. In the abstract quality of the lines is the suggestion of a remote landscape.

‘Historically in Greenland, the lack of ordinary materials like wood and metal, and even fiber for cordage, has made materials found on the beach or acquired through trade of great value. For this work, the sculptural vocabulary was chosen from primarily found material: wild harvested dogbane for cordage, driftwood for covers, scrap metal and horse bone, scavenged wood for the game board.

‘The objects, making abstract reference to the poem, allow the reader to re-experience the poem tactilely, and also participate in the telling of the story by arranging the objects on the game board.’

These elemental materials – the stone, the steel, the bone – even the driftwood and the dogsbane cord – are a perfect physical expression of the austere Arctic environment that I had tried to capture in the poem. In Greenland, driftwood washed ashore from other lands or shipwrecks was once a valuable commodity, a means of sustaining survival. What is discovered at the harbour finds a new incarnation on unfamiliar land.

Everything about Roni Gross and Peter Schell’s production improves on and enriches the original, one-dimensional poem. I am amazed by how close they have come to expressing the unspoken intentions of the work. It has been a wonderful experience to have the words taken out of my hands and see them develop and deepen in this way.



The Night Hunter
Words by Nancy Campbell
Sculpture, design and production by Roni Gross and Peter Schell
Z’roah Press, New York, 2011
Edition limited to 28 copies, signed and numbered by the artists and writer. The deluxe edition (pictured) is priced $2,500 and the standard edition (in a Cave Paper Case) $750