THREE ZINES, 2008
1/ Gracia Haby
Good evening, good evening. So nice of you to come all this way.
October, 2008
Digital print zine
Edition of 60
A 15cm X 10.5cm, 32 page colour and B&W zine with a bright red cover card and cardboard back, with a glued spine. Expect within the pages of this zine to receive a little love with your cabbage roll, to comb the lawns of Killarney in Ireland, to brake a few roof tiles in Stockholm and discover blue skies in Germany.
This zine features many of the collages and accompanying texts from Gracia’s occasional Postcard Travels series, alongside photographic ephemera from Elisabeth Söderberg’s life received by post from Alexandra Hedberg, and a few other hidden surprises.
The title of this zine has been borrowed from Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. It is a line spoken by Charles Ryder’s father, and in our copy of the book it falls on page 82.
An edition of this zine was exhibited as part of CFPR Book Arts: New Wave: artists' publishing in the 21st Century, School of Creative Arts, University of West England, Bristol, UK, 15th – 19th September, 2009, and later as part of A Sense of Place in Artists Books, Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, USA, 7th of November – 12th of December, 2012.
Collage on postcard and photograph, 2008
Titles of works as they appear:
Making a circle, almost
Seeking treasure in New Mexico
Where did you spring from?
At first all was not clear
All were in attendance
Looking for a way in
When in doubt it often helps to start at the beginning (I)
When in doubt it often helps to start at the beginning (II)
Like so?
A fine balancing act (II)
More unruly than I had hoped
We may not be able to see the moon from here but we know it hangs high above
Moving forward ought to seem like the easiest thing but today was proving the opposite
Searching for a way out
Looking for delicacies in Lebanon
Mind how you go in the capital
A fine balancing act (I)
Is this it?
How about this?
Or this?
Mind how you scamper
Feeling gigantic
Yes, that’s it
2/ Louise Jennison
Before it’s too late
January, 2008
Digital print zine
Edition of 70
A 9.5cm X 20.5cm, 36 page B&W zine with a glued spine.
This zine features watercoloured drawings from 2007–2008 of seals in repose and polar bears ambling, all interspersed between a single printed sentence, ‘The Arctic Ocean could be ice free in summer by 2050’ (Source: Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, 2004. Impacts of a Warming Arctic. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press).
3/ Gracia Haby
Small Collection
January, 2008
Digital print zine
Edition of 60
A 21cm X 15cm, 16 page colour and B&W zine with a handsewn spine in two strands of coloured cotton. This zine includes several original collage elements throughout.
Occasional Collection series
Titles of works as they appear:
All very ordered and as you’d expect
All were in their place
You mirrored me completely
Three heads are better than one
In neat formation, falling one by one
All as it should be
What’s one thing more? (View II)
Keeping still ensured no breakages
With a steady focus
Keeping it all together (View II)
Keeping it all together (View I)
To the ground below
Where your tears cannot reach me
Put right again (View II)
Inland Sea (View I)
Inland Sea (View II)
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Getting Lost in A Sense of Place in Artist Books
Sarah Peters
Walker Art Center
Minneapolis, USA,
6th December, 2012
On the second floor of Rapson Hall on the University of Minnesota campus sits a quiet haven of bookish delight. It is the Architecture and Landscape Architecture departments’ library, so its stacks are filled with beautiful books and the furniture is designer-made and lovely. More urgently, for the next week the library is also chock full of a curious assortment of artist books that take up architecture’s familiar preoccupation with place.
A Sense of Place in Artist Books is one of a series of collaborative efforts among university departments this fall; the sprawling table-top exhibition contains nearly 100 literary portals to elsewhere. The concept of "place" at play in all these artist books is only minimally defined in the exhibition description, and the territories covered in the material on view are as varied as the book forms themselves: tiny and coffee table-sized, photocopied and letterpress-printed, flat and sculptural, handmade and machine bound.
….
Other travelogues are more fictional than documentary. My favourite of these is a book by Gracia Haby of altered, fantastical postcards, and letters from an unknown traveler that become more surreal as the journey wanders on: “You never came, but in your place, a moose, an elk on a ramshackle bicycle, a wolverine and a pair of lynx from Gästrikland. They spoke to me of the weather, their plans, their likes and their loves.”
Of course, a “sense of place” is not only about romantic engagements with the sublime in nature, or escapist dreams of world travel. A smaller number of books on display investigate “place” as a locus of labor, the mundane: domestic interiors, neighborhood streets, hotel rooms. Of these, my eye is drawn to Paulette Myers-Rich’s urban industrial landscapes, elegantly printed images of abandoned buildings in St. Paul and Minneapolis where she and members of her family once worked.
After spending the better part of an afternoon reading these books, I realize that any of the volumes, individually, might well have been enough to pull me from my bearings; but altogether, they caused a total (if temporary) loss of any sense of my own time and place.
I look up at the clock to find it has sped farther ahead than I anticipated. Where am I again? My surroundings reemerge. I am in a quiet library on a gray day in an Eames chair paging through a portal to elsewhere.
A Sense of Place in Artist Books is on view through December 12 at the Architecture & Landscape Architecture Library, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis campus.
Sarah Peters is a Twin Cities-based artist, writer and arts programmer who is interested in public engagement with the arts and critical issues of our time.
Getting Lost in A Sense of Place in Artist Books
