Deeper Readings
I’m feeling very fortunate to be back in the stacks at Hull Libraries, for a chance to dig deeper and extend the learning that took place last year. Bodies of Work opened up an investigation into stock policies and value systems, and the structure of The Stacks spaces as containers: at the conclusion of that first residency period, it really did feel as if we were only just scratching the surface.
The word ‘excavation’ is something that I’m very eager to work into some more this time around, mapping the chronologies of some of the many periodicals and journals in the reference collections to a more personal history, and my core concerns around memory and environmental change. With an image in mind of the stacks spaces as being a stratigraphy of information, the basement, which is where I’ll be spending most of my time, represents a foundation - a sea-floor of unassuming but cautionary marks in time, from reporters and readers speaking into the present.
INK
COLOUR
FORECAST
CHILDHOOD
INDUSTRY
CLIMATE
INDEX
In the lead-up to Day 1 at the library, I was finally able to take up an opportunity to visit the G.F. Smith paper factory here in Hull - an amazing company that really embraces it’s own history and direction within the community over time, and relationships not only to customers and suppliers but within the factory as a place of work, where the team effort represents something really powerful. For a while, I would have said that despite not working in any one given discipline or form, my work pivots around printmaking, and that’s where I feel, or felt, most skilful. I made a lot of photo-etchings and screenprints over the years and at some point came to feel that the repetitious quality of the way I was using those processes started to overtake, or undercut, wider possibilities for work to emerge and continue moving between forms, without the fixed ‘stamp’ of the print as a product of a design. Recently, I’ve been thinking some more about this, triggered by a number of things including the shifting visual properties of commercial print from litho, or off-set print, to digital and the saturated colour profiles of the 1970’s-80s that I love seeing in my National Geographic collection. I thought of these when looking at printed samples on different paper stocks at the paper factory. My relationship also to colour is that it should never become a secondary thought, or a ‘what if’, but should always be integral and used only when it absolutely suggests itself somehow, otherwise it can really throw off the potential in the exchange that takes place between the work and those around it.
Among the pages I began to scan in the basement last Friday, I’ve already found numerous passages describing colour in the atmosphere at scenes of natural disasters, and in less dramatic reports of the weather day-to-day, all of which, these occurrences that I discover, will be collected to potentially create ‘measurements’ over time, or a visual system. This exercise creates a starting point for diving into a massive wealth of information across several invaluable collections - there is literally so much material held in one stacks space alone that I’ve chosen to focus in on a few significant collections to begin with, at this basic outset guided by a number of key words. In my studio, I am surrounded by boxes of bound and un-bound periodicals that could reasonably be transported - these will be read, scanned, returned and swapped every couple of weeks, while the larger bound volumes, most of which are fragile, and incredibly beautiful, will stay on the shelves in the basement for me to investigate on-site. The periodical collections I’m diving into for this phase of the project are The Sphere (weekly 1900-1964), Nature (in collection between 1950-1990s), The Graphic (1869-1932), Geography (quarterly, in collection between 1927-1980s), and Science Progress (quarterly, 1906-1933), as well as picking up on several other isolated boxes of sometimes obscure publications such as Area and The Field. These contain a broad range of writing from academic to editorial, journalistic and personal records. Over the course of the next few months, I will be sharing some of the stories I find and fragments that accumulate here on the blog.
I’m really grateful to be joined this time by Thomas Robinson of The Aimless Archive, and he will be curating the work generated over the next six months towards an exhibition in April 2023 - take some time to check out Tom’s work. Personally, this is a great opportunity for me to see how the interface between our practices changes given dedicated time and space. Check back next week for a progress update, and in the mean time you can subscribe to the project newsletter using the form below for information coming up on how you can get involved in The Stacks 2.
