{Looking only for you. 28 pages in length, this artists' book features collage and pencil across the pages of Der Rhein.}
{Passing through, undetected for the time being. 18 pages in length, this artists' book features collage and pencil across the pages of A Souvenir of Bangor.}
{From the second day of installation, and Louise's bookstands are as beautiful as I knew they would be.}
{On the wall, two recent collaborative prints, and postcards, too. On the table, a library of books.}
On the pages of my collaged artists’ books there feature many animals, many birds. My tailed or feathered protagonists often out of place, oft too large for their present surrounds. They scale rooftops, climb cathedral spires; perch high in treetops do my central characters. Sometimes they saunter nonchalantly past a city square. Sometimes they tiptoe or creep. And all the time they afford me chance not just to play with scale and humorous, I hope, foreign juxtapositions, but to convey feelings of awkwardness and oddness. They are out of place, not just in urban environment or strange land (the mountain lions home range is not Brussels), but also in feeling. Being animals, in form, they are easier to relate to. One is not distracted by the dissimilarities because there are so many. I am not covered in fur, with claws for fingertips and a tail to serve as rudder on mountain climb. I am so different that I look only at what the animal is doing in its new environment. It is on the sidelines, watching. It is looking for a safe place to curl. It is passing undetected. It is slinking through the city unseen. It, like me, feels the odd one out.
+ Louise and I will be turning the pages of these books before the week draws to a close. When next you visit, a new page will be revealed.
+ A small review in the paper by Dylan Rainforth. You can read it here.
{Look closely.}
+ I made it, finally, to see Carolyn Fraser's beautiful work, Envelope, at Mailbox 141. You can, too, if you head there before the month is out.
