Week 25: 4th – 10th March
After all the planning and preparation, the time was finally here for the 16th International Contemporary Artist Book Fair. I’d spent a long time and a lot of effort on online promotion developing the website and social media, as well as guest blogs for the Culture Vulture about how and why I got involved with the fair. The artists’ book fair is an element of PAGES, a research project developed by Chris Taylor and John McDowall. My role was to increase online visibility and engagement, both of the fair and the research project as a whole.
All in all, it was an amazing (if exhausting) experience, and a brilliant way to get more involved with my supervisor’s project. One thing I’ve noticed about the fine art department here at Leeds, is that there is a big drive towards getting postgraduates involved in live projects within the school, which allows students the opportunity not only to build their skills and showcase their talents within academia, but also the opportunity to bring something new to the project.
Filter
Not content with getting involved with the promotion of the fair, I also decided to take the opportunity to produce another exhibition under the umbrella of PAGES. As I’ve recently been working a lot with archives, I’ve become increasingly interested in how to address accessibility and engagement with collections, without the risk to conservation. Online and digital archives can go someway to addressing this, however, they are still not a replacement for the tactility and sculptural qualities of the object (nor should they be).
This is how the concept for Filter developed, as an opportunity to showcase existing collections within non-traditional art environments, such as coffee shops, with a view to developing audiences and increasing accessibility and knowledge of independent publishing practice in the arts. Collections ranged from independent zine production through to responses to the 200th anniversary of the Luddite uprising.
The archive of the Artist Book Collective
Another aspect of the fair was showcasing artists’ working practices through a range of presentations. My supervisor was keen for me to get involved with this, as he was interested in hearing more about my curatorial practice, as well as helping me to develop my presentation skills. The focus of the presentations were around curating and collecting so it was a perfect opportunity for me to showcase my work with Artist Book Collective, and highlight the strands of enquiry running through it.
In particular it was interesting to note that the nature of the exhibitions developed as a response or set of responses to a proposed question or problem, but through the staging of the exhibition, or as a result of audience response, that this process could produce more questions. The exhibition archive then becomes a narrative thread which continually experiments with the curatorial process in order to generate discussion, rather than as an end in itself.
The paradox of categorisation
There were also three other presentations during the two days of the fair and each presentation responded to the question of collections in very different ways, through the creation of personal taxonomies, responses to curatorial briefs, or gallery interpretation.
Patrick Wildgust, curator of Shandy Hall, Coxwold, developed new ways of engaging with the collection through artist and writer interventions within the collections of the Laurence Sterne Trust. Selected artists from AMBruno discussed their approach to producing new works for exhibitions and book fairs around a given theme. Finally, Dr Sharon Kivland, addressed her own personal collections of ephemera through the production of new books which attempted to organise these objects into meaningful categories.
The interesting thing about all these practices was that, although the main focus was collecting, each exhibition resulted in the production of new works, highlighting the fact that any attempts to organise or categorise objects, will often produce infinitely more connections and questions to be answered.
