Sarah Bodman


     
Sarah Bodman
Centre for Fine Print Research, UWE Bristol
Sarah.Bodman@uwe.ac.uk
www.bookarts.uwe.ac.uk


Biography

Sarah Bodman is an artist and Senior Research Fellow for Artists’ Books at the Centre for Fine Print Research (CFPR), UWE Bristol, where she runs research projects investigating and promoting contemporary book arts. She is the author of Creating Artists’ Books, the editor of the Artist’s Book Yearbook a biennial reference publication on contemporary book arts, the Book Arts Newsletter, and The Blue Notebook journal for artists’ books. Sarah also writes a regular column on artists’ books for the ARLIS News-Sheet, and the journal Printmaking Today.

Academic paper

Artists as 21st Century Explorers of the Book 
We now live in an age where, according to the writer and artist Radoslaw Nowakowski, e-paper has now overtaken p-paper, but what does that mean for book artists? And what kinds of books are they making?

Access to available technology allows artists to share bookworks with a much wider audience through free online viewing and downloads. Artists are already experimenting with publishing online, Guy Begbie’s video bookwork activation ‘Orange Rumba’ for example. Some prefer now to work exclusively within e-publishing, Nicolas Frespech has been producing many artists’ books solely for mobile devices and the Internet in order to disseminate his ideas freely through his ‘lirepub’ project.

At the other end of the spectrum are those who will continue to uphold the beauty of the book as a physical object, Dmitry Sayenko calls himself ‘a mediaeval artist’ creating his artists’ books using the same ‘technologies’ that were available in the 15th Century; handmaking his own paper, printing his woodcuts and type in his own studio to make limited editions of myths examining human nature. And in the middle are those artists, including Heidi Neilson, John Bently and Andi McGarry, who explore books with a multidisciplinary approach. McGarry produces music and animation to bring his unique books to life; Bently is a poet/book artist, who creates characters, hand prints his texts and images and performs the characters from his books through his band, and Neilson presents the book and video together as a complete experience of a single piece.

This paper will explore some of the crossovers and standpoints in the current field of artists’ publishing, looking at some of the ways in which artists make books that explore the old and new territories and the ones that delight in the middle.