artists books
A little book of breathing was acquired for their collection by the State Library Queensland. It was first published as an essay ‘My father’s body in nine drawings’ in Verity La. It was then made into an artists book and exhibited in String Books at The Left Hand Gallery in Braidwood NSW.
Printed from photocopied text and drawings scanned as high res jpegs on 100gsm copy paper, Georgia serif typeface, bound with linen thread in 5 signatures with tissue paper pages, hand coloured and stamped. Includes a bookmark of found Bible text from Genesis, cut in a strip. The Bible is the King James Version and belonged to the artist when she was a small girl.
Maurice Blanchot once wrote: Look again at this splendid being from which beauty streams: he is, I see this, perfectly like himself. And someone says to me, kindly: Francesca, he’ll be tangle free you know, when he’s gone he’ll be at peace.
No Notes (this is writing) (the artists book) is a continuous collaborative work in the form of a loose dialogue between Francesca Rendle-Short and Martina Copley written on iphones that arose out of a shared interest in what it means to practice writing or something other. Written to one another – but also to our readers as a form of note-taking (almost as if the inner voice was spoken out loud) – the book is a drafting in action made concrete in poetic notes.
It is an open-ended dialogue as double act, with asides between an artist and writer. Writing as a process of unfolding. It is dialogue or ‘across speak’ riddled with visual surprise, invigoration and doubt, desire and struggle.
What happens or emerges between making and thinking is a result of the interplay of bodies and intelligences: the artist/s at work, materials at hand, and the process and illumination of making itself. Both artists are interested in the stutter and waywardness of dialogue, the potential of miscommunication. We were curious to see what would happen working episodically and in collaboration; working on screen in place of notebook, and writing not towards an end.
[Background: No Notes developed after Martina invited Francesca to participate in an annotative process as ‘respondant’ to her exhibition of work; The movement of the aside, which investigated uses of the aside as a way to discuss the movement of making. ‘Across speak and/or waywardness’ as a ‘three-act structured recitation with prologue and coda’ was published in Axon: Creative Explorations. See also ‘Parsing the aside (the poetics of immersion and patience as dialogue)’ in Creative Writing as Research IV, TEXT Journal Special Issue, Number 30, October 2015.]