Sunday 26 October 2008

Laura Robertson

An exhibition of envelopes as containers and messengers. Curated by Sophie Loss and Mary Yacoob

Envelopes >>> evocative objects >>> containers, messengers, witnesses >>> they hide and disclose >>> hint at communication >>> secret networks and allusions >>> postal system >>> icons on mobile phones >>> their content invisible >>> symbol for the pre internet era.

This is a group show presenting an installation housed in a gallery space. The gallery has been remodelled into domestic setting which acts as a container for envelopes and their insides. The artists selected for this show examine the formal aspect and the conceptual possibilities of the medium. The multiplicity of directions explored by individual artists reflects their practices and creates a whole which is complex, textured and fun.


Veronica Perez Karleson, Untitled, Chinese ink and white pen on envelope, 16cm x 23cm, 2008

Friday 24 October 2008

15:1 Exhibition, curated by Sumi Perera


15: 1 is an exhibition of fifteen artists' books by Chinese students from the CAFA (Central Academy of Fine Art) in Beijing.

Image: Recycle by Wang Shunshun.

Amy Jo Nolan


Amy Jo's work focuses on Royal Mail, in particular envelopes and postage marks. This project started along time ago when she first came to university and her mum started sending her weird and wonderful parcels. Amy Jo's work has developed and she is now looking very closely at envelopes and all their small details.

Tracey Eastham


Tracey is a fairly new member of Wolstenholme Projects and has been commissioned to make and exhibit a new paper collage work for the Artists' Book Fair

Thursday 23 October 2008

Ian Abbott


Ian is a book artist working in Southport. Currently engaged with 'Echo' (miniature book) the third of his four word tetralogy, which includes 'Jump' (traditional) and 'Slow' (Japanese stab). Ian is interested in metamorphs, paper engineering and has initiated several mail art projects with different groups across the US and Europe.

Ailie Rutherford


Drawing on Dreams

I have been keeping diaries of my dreams for a long time.

Recently I have begun to teach myself to draw in a hypnagogic state, keeping a notebook beside my pillow. I’d been reading Sigmund Freud’s "On Dreams" and fallen asleep while reading. In a semi-awake state I picked up my pencil and notebook to sketch, discovering later that I’d drawn on Freud’s book instead.

Since then I have been using the book as my diary, drawing onto the pages each day, the drawings having an arbitrary relationship to the text.

Elizabeth Willow


Elizabeth Willow frequently makes use of found objects both natural and unnatural, pursuing a fascination with objects that have a story (whether known or imagined) with fragments, broken and discarded objects. Her work often involves an element of contradiction which is expressed in various ways, through the use of materials which have seemingly incongruent qualities such as strength and delicacy, through the creation of objects whose properties defy their function, or through the attempt to exploit or subvert the tension between such opposing aspects or forces as attraction and repulsion, secrecy and spectacle, freedom and constraint, the supposed imaginary and the purportedly real.

Elizabeth Willow has been commissioned to produce a new bookwork for Artists' Book Fair Liverpool, containing her beautiful and sometimes tragic short stories about the desire to fly.

Emily Speed


Emily is interested in buildings and in the way that architecture can act as a metaphor for our internal selves (the body as a building that houses the mind). Her work is concerned with the enduring sense of memory and/or personal identity that is often embedded into or linked with built space.

Wirral Metropolitan College


BA Fine Art Course


Working with the artists’ book format has given both students and staff the opportunity to imaginatively engage with the meaning and context of the book form.


Our responses encompass a wide range of approaches reflecting the diverse preoccupations and methodologies in our individual practices.


Image: Louise Tett 'Falling In'

Leila Shetty

Tuesday 21 October 2008

peach-tree pear-tree press


More info coming soon..

contact: peachtreepeartree@gmail.com

Monday 20 October 2008

Gill Smith


Gill Smith is an illustrator working in Liverpool.
Her work uses found fragments of text as a starting point to create her personal visual narratives. The stories usually evolve from notes and drawings made in sketchbooks. In a way Gill's hand made books are refined versions of her personal sketchbooks.
website address to follow soon.

website: http://www.flickr.com/photos/22861314@N05/

Sunday 19 October 2008

Contents May Vary



Contents May Vary is a Manchester based artist collective co-founded in 2004
Alice Bradshaw - Liz Murphy - Richards Shields

CMV show collectively as well as individually and also organise large scale exhibitions inviting other artists to participate. They find new and challenging ways to exhibit with particular focus on site-responsivity to non-conventional and everyday spaces. Additionally, CMV run an independent free-of-charge publication with international distribution.

Sumi Perera



Sumi Perera’s artist's books (SuperPress) are an amalgam of influences of her work in the East (Sri Lanka, her native country), and the West (the United Kingdom, her adoptive country) as a doctor, scientist and artist. Slight variations on the theme are used to generate 'unique multiples', whilst blurring boundaries between the artist/artisan, orient/occident and the past and present. Process is as important as the ‘finished’ article, often instructing the viewer/reader to intervene allowing editorial control to be shared. Her work has won several international awards and is held in many private and public collections including the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Tate.

Daryl Waller



Daryl has been living in London and working as an artist since graduating in 2003. He has shown his work frequently in Cornwall and London and has also exhibited internationally with the West Germany Gallery in Berlin and the Tart Gallery in San Fransisco. Daryl is nomadic with his choice of medium, working predominantly with painting and drawing, but also makes video based work and artists' books.

website: www.winterdrawings.com

Claire Cooper





Claire Cooper makes charming collaged works, all of which relate to her family and family life.

AM Bruno


AM Bruno represents current artistic thought, practice and sensibility translated and expanded into book art form. The artists in the group are visual and conceptual practitioners in all media, including painting, photography, video, performance and sculpture.

The themes vary from: enquiry into the nature of books/sketchbooks; human body/desire/private life; the value of artificiality; writing/image; and time.

AM Bruno is an alliance of 24 artists initiated by MA Fine Art graduates from Central Saint Martins.

contact: am.bruno24@googlemail.com

Sarah Morpeth




Sarah Morpeth's current work is an ongoing series of books relating to a film with which she has been obsessed for years - Powell & Pressburger's 'I know where I'm Going'. In these pieces she explores the interdependence of form and content and ways in which each can illuminate the other. She is also interested in the mechanics of reading - how we don't consciously register the turn of the page, the placing of the text and how too - while engrossed in film - we don't notice the editing, the transitions, the structural elements. Nevertheless these dramatically affect our perceptions and Sarah explores ways of highlighting such structural aspects in her work.

website: www.sarahmorpeth.com

contact: sarah_morpeth@hotmail.com

Phillip Marsden / Compromise Comics Enterprise


Compromise Comics Enterprise publishes the small-press comic book works of artist Phillip Marsden, including such titles as Clam & Elgar etc, Aesop’s Fables, Get The Look, the collaborative Blackout and a specially commissioned publication to coincide with Liverpool Biennial 08.

website: www.phillipmarsden.com

contact: phil_marsden@hotmail.com

Robert D. Davies


Robert's cards and books are drawings created from observation and fiction and exist as little universes of their own. They sometimes interlink and sometimes stop at cliff edges, or merely hint at other possible routes, as in a journey. Curiosities in a museum, or short marratives born from insignificant, fragile moments...an interplay of the absurd and the mundane, control and abandonment of control...

website: www.robertddavies.com

contact: robdavies72@yahoo.co.uk

Black and White Cat Press


The Black and White Cat Press was created by David Birchall in 2001, since then it has been drawing and producing quality handmade zines, comics, books, cds and prints.

website: www.blackandwhitecatpress.org

contact: blackandwhitecatpress@hotmail.com

Camp Yellow


Camp Yellow is a creative art club from the city of Manchester with three members; Faye Coral Johnson, Lisa Handley and Mike Redmond. They create limited edition zines and books that catalogue drawings, pictures and stories.

website: campyellow.blogspot.com

contact: mike-redmond@hotmail.com

Francis Elliott








website: www.foundrypress.co.uk

contact: foundry.press@virgin.net

Cafe Royal


Cafe Royal is an online and offline publishing house, specialising in artists' books and zines. Cafe Royal issue four includes Marcus Oakley, Jockum Nordstrom, Mamma Anderson (courtesy David Zwirner NY), Henrik Drescher and Craig Atkinson.

contact: craig@caferoyal.org