Publishing as Creative Arts Practice

The Small Publishers Fair is an annual gathering of books by writers, artists, poets, musicians, book designers, and their publishers. It takes place in London’s historic Conway Hall, in literary Bloomsbury. The Fair and its website showcase the diversity of both UK and international small press publishing with links to this community. The calendar provides a good starting point to explore other events where artists and writers congregate around zines, artists books, and small independent publishing using hybrid and interdisciplinary methods. These events are great places to explore, meet, and discuss ideas of how a wide variety of creative work can employ the book form to communicate, spread ideas, and create visual content.

I was present at the Small Publishers Fair with the Intergraphia publishing project, which is co-edited by myself and artist-writer Emma Bolland. Intergraphiaa is committed to inclusive and intersectional publishing, focusing on work by artists and writers across and between genres and disciplines. We were pleased to launch our series of 3 pamphlets with nine artist writers whose work explores a range of hybrid methods between image and text. Series 3 artists and writers include Eva Aldea, Akeem Balogun, Derek Beaulieu, Clee Claire Lee, Louise Finney, Briony Hughes, Sharon Kivland, Yaz Leigh, and Petra Schultz-Wollgast.

As well as promoting the work of these artists and writers, I had a piece of my work on display made as part of the new AMBruno project Intervals. This project contains 14 artists’ books that explore the theme of intervals in conceptual and material ways. The project was launched with a display and panel discussion at Tate Britain reading rooms.

My hand-made loose leaf bookwork is stopping. Or explores the material possibilities of the full stop as an interval or break in the process of reading and writing. A moment to take breath. The function of a full stop is to close, consequently also to open. To curtail and to expand.

The Logic of Sense by Gilles Deleuze offered source material to parse. By extracting the closing and opening words either side of a full stop, the newly fragmented text offers further gaps for the inherent potential of the as-yet-unthought. Scaled full stops are printed, embossed, and cut from the page surface to reveal elements of text and image beneath. Some cut textual elements are stitched back into the page space to offer moveable and tangential connections across existing fragmented phrases.

As someone engaged in making, publishing, and reading artists books, I am always keen to add to my ever-growing library collection. This year I bought and swapped books to obtain an interesting array of work that spans commercially printed books, hand-made limited editions, and short-run printed pamphlets across writing, poetry, visual poetry, as well as photography with text.