A book is much more than a rectangular block of paper, it holds ideas, emotions, a memory trace of life. Using things other than a sheaf of paper to contain words can enhance what is being said. Our ‘books’ have been made by older people living in the North West of England and show ingenuity, wit and expressiveness. You will find medicine boxes re-labelled with prescriptions for happiness, a Jewish cookbook that rekindles holocaust memories, candles celebrating virility, baby socks as reminiscence and evidence bags that prove the makers aren’t quite dead yet. Please visit our portfolio site for more images please click here... |
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| Miscellaneous small writing – textworks, soundworks, poems and artists’ books made 2007-9. The candles are hymns to pagan urges. The concertina books celebrate wordlessness, while the matchboxes are a homage to eccentricity, fear-free and with added nicotine. |
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| Brackenhurst – handwritten postcards - recastings of poem fragments with meditations on sanctuary and arrival. Others in this sequence play with the mystery of text part-obscured by envelopes, words lost in transit. |
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| A wee star coming through rewrites pharmaceutical packaging with prescriptions for happiness. These pieces play counter to the fear and compliance that medicines can arouse. |
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| Paracetamol Soup – a cookbook of Jewish recipes that blends warm recollection of childhood with repressed memories of Nazi genocide. Some of the makers of this book were holocaust survivors and it reflects on their process of simultaneously needing to remember and to forget. This is a book made in memory. Works from this project were screened at Piccadilly Station as part of Holocaust Memorial Day 2009. |
