Artists’ Books #23: FOMO – Falmouth Art Publishing Fair

A new artists’ publishing event launches in the south west this month. Before Plymouth’s Counter Art Book Fair returns in March 2018, FOMO: Falmouth Art Publishing Fair will showcase experimental art publishing over a weekend of free events at Falmouth Art Gallery.

Organised by artists and writers Neil Chapman, Maria Christoforidou, Carolyn Shapiro and Gillian Wylde of Falmouth School of Art in partnership with Falmouth Art Gallery, FOMO (‘Fear Of Missing Out’) will present artists’ books, editions, posters, leaflets, multiples, audio and ephemera.

The organisers state: “Fear Of Missing Out implies anxiety associated with contemporary modes of communication, the profusion of cultural events made possible by a supposed diversification and democratising of media channels. FOMO implies its converse (JOMO), a joy associated with missing out, the potential of community-building on a micro or local level, in the means and in the relationships most ready to hand.”

The fair brings regional and national artists and writers together under eclectic themes such as Disobedience and Dissent, Counter-reading and Diffraction, Geekery and Amateurism, and Failure, Glitch and Dirt.

Artists and publications at FOMO include Penryn-based artist Hannah Levene’s Thouzine, an ongoing project to produce 1000 zines. Each issue is made from one sheet of A4 paper, folded into an 8-page booklet and uploaded for visitors to the Thouzine site to download and print. The artist kindly asks recipients to “Keep, swap, collect, give away, but don’t sell.”

Also showing is artist Ami Clarke, the founder of Banner Repeater, sited on platform 1 of Hackney Downs railway station in London. Banner Repeater has an energetic exhibitions programme, hosts a reading group and also produces Un-Publish, a paper-based series on ideas around writing and publishing within emergent technologies.

Devon-based Paul Ramsay is a sound artist, writer and member of Field Study, the international collective of mail artists. He will show a new edition, mourHu, a cut-up collection of altered cartoons from the 1940s-’80s, published under his Alembic Books imprint this August.

Other contributors to FOMO include Falmouth-based graphic literature publishers Atlantic Press and Plymouth-based collagists Maddy and Paul Hearn, part of a great line-up bringing well-earned attention to the diverse and stimulating artists’ publishing activities taking place in the area.

FOMO: Falmouth Art Publishing Fair, 29 September – 1 October 2017, Falmouth Art Gallery, Municipal Buildings, The Moor, Falmouth, Cornwall, TR11 2RT

Use the Artists’ Books series tag for other articles by Sarah Bodman exploring artists’ book publishing

Images:
1. Detail of the exhibition ‘A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance’ at Banner Repeater, 2016. Left: Ami Clarke, Author of the Blank Swan (2016); centre: screen capture of 3D render of clay cuneiform table, with astronomical procedure text for Jupiter: Mathematical rules for the area of a trapezoid; right: Elaine Sturtevant, Author of the Quixote (2009)
2. Detail: ‘and a new learning’, one of Hannah Levene’s Thouzine free download publications. More can be found at: thouzine.wordpress.com
3. mourHu, Paul Ramsay, Alembic Books. A collection of caption-swapped cartoons from the 40s – 80s. Edited by artist Paul Ramsay, these drawings have had their direction of travel changed and ask just one question: ‘Do you have a sense of mourHu?’
4. Smock, Redell Olsen, edition of 200, 2017. The book begins with an epigraph from Luce Irigaray, ‘Of what [is] this is? Of air’, and refers to her critical engagement with Heidegger’s forgetting of this invisible substance that is all around us

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