 Bookmarks X: Infiltrating the Library SystembyLaine Farley
With the beginning of fall comes the launch of the tenth anniversary of the online bookmark exhibit sponsored by the Centre for Fine Print Research at the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK known as Bookmarks X: Infiltrating the Library System. A showcase for artist- and librarian-created bookmarks, this year’s exhibit curated as always by Sarah Bodman is more muted than in past years but equally inspiring. The overall impression from the list of artists is perhaps more subdued but handsome and elegant in tones of brown, gray, and dark blue with a smattering of orange and gold. Among the thirty contributions, it seems there are even more literary references than usual—poetry or books that have inspired the artist, or appreciation for elements of the book. One other theme that emerged as I went through the sites was that I had to research various terms, sources or other things mentioned in the description. It became a learning experience beyond just the pleasure of examining the bookmarks. Another difference this year is that I have no physical examples. Usually I have obtained at least a few of the bookmarks through distributors but this time there are only two U.S. distributors in Minnesota and Washington. I may have one more chance to obtain some examples from Iceland of all places. It was the most popular vacation spot among the staff at my library this year and there may be one other person who will be there during the time of the exhibit. Other distribution points are worldwide in Japan, Egypt, Italy, Australia, Canada and of course the UK. Last year I focused on recurring themes and that seems to be a good way to review this year’s submissions. Just as the look of the bookmarks seems more subdued, there is also less diversity in themes I could identify although there are strong examples in each. In addition to Literary, there were themes related to Nature, Memory, Wayfinding, and Pure Art. Many of the bookmarks reflect more than one theme. Karen Austin offers a stylized plant with what might be berries, but for her are about “connecting the dots.” She relates this pattern to communication and ties it to bookmarks that note a “specific place in communication, for future reference, or just where the reader has paused, only to revisit another time,” thus suggesting themes of Nature, Wayfinding and Literary by citing the bookmark’s function. Similarly Mavina Baker’s bookmark with the title “bring a little stone in the construction of memory” associates pebbles she picks up on her travels with stones used to mark trails or mountain tops as well as visits to graves. She says “it struck me that stones are frequently used as an aide-memoire. Not unlike a bookmark.” She thus adds Memory to the other three themes. Several artists combine Literary components with Nature in very different ways. A strong linocut image of a tree with mountains in the background accompanies a quote from spiritual teacher Ram Dass on Lisa Isley’s tribute to Mount Rundle in Banff national park in Alberta, Canada. Karen Kinoshita printed an organic gray image on one side and on the other side made a list of a life cycle actions from “plant seeds” to “write poetry,” culminating in “leave a cast of thousands.” Janet Bone’s “Long Live the Weeds” was inspired by two literary works. First, the poem “Inversnaid” by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and possibly this passage in particular: What would the world be, once bereft According to the Bodleian Library: “Hopkins described his visit to Inversnaid in a letter to a friend: ‘I hurried from Glasgow one day to Loch Lomond. The day was dark and partly hid the lake, yet did not altogether disfigure it but gave a pensive or solemn beauty which left a deep impression on me. I landed at Inversnaid for a few hours’. This is the manuscript of the poem he wrote during, or soon after, the visit. An enraptured evocation of wild nature, and a plea to preserve it, Inversnaid seems especially relevant today.” Janet’s second source of inspiration was Richard Mabey’s Weeds: In Defense of Nature's Most Unloved Plants, described by the New York Times Book Review as “Wry and subtle. . . . Mabey argues without scolding, that at a time of great environmental change and uncertainty, weeds may soon be all we’ve got left.” Her bookmark is an image of some of her “favorite” garden weeds. Originally she planned to create a florilegium but realized she had too many at thirty-four. Her lovely bookmark introduced me to two new works and one new word. Tia Blassingame created a poignant tribute to the 2007 car bombing of al-Mutanabbi Street, the bookselling nexus of Baghdad, by using a chine-collé technique to attach pieces of mulberry and banana papers to a white paper on which she printed her poem. According to Wikipedia, “chine-collé is a special technique in printmaking, in which the image is transferred to a surface that is bonded to a heavier support in the printing process. One purpose is to allow the printmaker to print on a much more delicate surface, such as Japanese paper or linen, which pulls finer details off the plate. Another purpose is to provide a background colour behind the image that is different from the surrounding backing sheet.” She explains why she used this technique: “The orange and grey chine-colléd pieces reference the destroyed texts; the beauty and nobility of books and of reading are on display despite the ruin. I was interested in how even when books or pages are destroyed by intention or accident, the imagination and creativity of the writer, of the reader are not diminished. Words and ideas once unleashed are not so easily interrupted.” Tia’s work is one of the few in this year’s exhibit with social commentary, a theme that was prominent in last year’s exhibit. Combining Literary themes with Wayfinding, Hazel Grainger overlays fractured letterpress forms of letters and other symbols onto text containing place names and geographic coordinates to suggest ideas about “data, place and communication” as well as chaos superimposed on order. An even stronger association of these two themes is found in Helen Mason Williamson’s clever “Alleys and Allies” bookmarks. They take us on a series of routes “plotted between two streets in London, this time representing a great literary partnership.” She notes that this series extends the ideas she used in her Lovers’ Lanes series in the Bookmarks VIII exhibit in 2008. This time she makes us work a little harder but the connection between Finn House and Sawyer Street should ring a bell. They really made me want to walk the routes just to see what other random associations I could observe along the way. Paula MacGregor creates a rich tapestry with Literary and Memory themes in her “Yellow Wallpaper” series by literally lifting memories in pieces of wallpaper from boards she salvaged from a 100-year-old cottage. She asks “What could these walls tell us? What stories and dramas had they seen?” and named the series in honor of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s work titled The Yellow Wallpaper. Tracy Turner’s series combines themes of Nature and Memory as she plays off the number ten for Bookmarks X, relating “deca” to “decay.” Her close-up photographs highlight the “intense beauty of weathered stone and the multi-coloured lichens which grow on them. The images reject the deleterious notion of decay as putrefaction and degeneration. They show weathered stonework from gravestones in the churchyard of St Mary the Virgin, Westmill, Hertfordshire and the carved limestone base-course from St Martin’s Church, New Buckenham in Norfolk.” I have tried to capture in photographs this sort of interplay between aged stone and lichens and can appreciate even more how stunning these images are. One other entry focuses primarily on Memory with nostalgic images of tape measures. Angie Butler’s “Getting the Measure of Things” pays tribute to her grandmother as part of a series exploring what traditional English sayings have meant to her. She says her “Nan” used this phrase often which means “to assess the nature, character, quality, etc. of someone or something.” She goes on to say, “I spent a lot of time in her company as a small child. She used to let me loose in her ‘bits and pieces’ drawers of haberdashery. I enjoyed arranging the unusual items I found: in sizes, colours and shapes etc. I had a special fondness for her tape measures. They were beautiful, made in pastel shades of green, yellow, blue and pink. We spent lots of time together. She was always laughing; a kind person dressed in a flowery apron, and I loved her dearly. I got the measure of her.” This description and the lovingly created bookmarks call up a wonderful image of quiet but significant moments in a little girl’s life. The Literary theme is further represented by a number of artists either “literally” or in a more abstract manner. Valerie Frey offers a spare and elegant image to illustrate a passage from Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Duino Elegies,” the Fourth Elegy: “Who has not sat before his own heart’s curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.” I discovered that this passage has been translated in different ways that to me change the meaning, for example, “Who has not sat, scared, before his heart’s curtain? It drew itself up: the scenery was of Departure.” On a lighter note, Sarah Bodman pays tribute to her love of horror books and movies with elegant images of friendly looking camping trailers with a smudge of blood red at the bottom. As she observes, such works “nearly always [contain] the raising of undead armies and evils to cabins and campsites in the woods (luckily for us).” Brian E. Tagg also has some fun with his series that explores using images to represent novels. I got the Passage to India pun and recognized On the Road, but had to look up the literary associations with the Grand Hotel des Bains, and I never could figure out the source of the coffee and doughnuts passage—can you? Staff at the Collins Memorial Library, University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, WA give us a handsome book spine to remind us: “Reading: Your Window to the World.” Linda Johnston uses abstract images that are “Reminiscent of a well-loved and treasured book collection” and explains that “the work touches on the pleasures of ownership and our interactions with the book as an object in itself.” Other abstract explorations include Ken Hugill’s intriguing laser-cut design. He explains it is from “a detail of a horse trough in a quiet square in the centre of Rome . . . The carvings on the side of the trough created their own abstraction with little work from me. It also looks a little like a stack of paper sheets being ‘flicked’ before use - apposite for a bookmark.” His work has similarities with that of Hall (below) and his statement about his interest in “the effect of time on place, and the abstractions that erosion and wear creates” reminds me of Turner’s (above) fascination with graveyard lichens on stone although expressed in a completely different way. Brooke Koven created bookmarks that are beautiful as well as clever, using rich textures to create punctuation symbols, titled “i/!”. She says it is a play on punctuation and book ownership, and proclaims her love for bound books and bookmarks. Other artists focused on parts of books or their accessories. Jo Cook combined antique ornaments of animals, found in London’s Spitalfields Market, with quotes from William Morris, Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan about the use of ornament in design. Sue Bovington created beautiful marbled end paper designs using, of all things, powdered carrageen moss seaweed. Nick Silva looks to the future with his bookmark that provides instructions on making a bookmark out of cloth for a Kindle—and it doubles as a screen wipe. He points out that his submission is not the bookmark but rather instructions for making one, and should be destroyed after the fabric bookmark is produced. He muses on the future of accessories for books “in an era when accessorisation provides unnecessary ornamentation,” especially for digital books. Will bookmarks survive in some form such that we’ll “see this project reaching Bookmarks L?” The Wayfinding theme is further expressed in offerings by Sumi Perera in a series called “Lines Exploring Space II”. Abstract images of various patterns of lines and defined spaces are combined with stitching and threads to create sometimes orderly and sometimes chaotic pathways. Tennille Davis Shuster plays with ideas that have appeared in past exhibits, combining hand torn strips from a 1969 Rand McNally International Atlas with “You Are Here” arrows, sewn with binding thread. Ingrid Wiche devised a complex scheme for using a Google Earth image of streets that she mounted to cardboard and cut to different heights. This is a case where seeing the physical bookmark would provide a much better sense of what she was trying to achieve in her “Street Views of Bristol” series. Be sure to look at the full plan from the link on her page. Last but not least is the Pure Art category where artists focus on their own techniques or images. Barbara Sykes takes a key image of a dancer from a series of paintings and drawings that are central to her work. Laura Russell “recycles” images from her artist’s books, featuring neon carnival signs, old advertising signs, some related to “meat,” and store displays featuring manikins of various types. Finally, Charlotte Hall’s “Pop-up Cities” has to be my favorite. Although she chose this design because she uses architectural forms in her work, it resonates with many aspects of my interests in bookmarks. Architectural forms are well suited to the long and narrow design requirements of bookmarks. Barbara’s clever pop-up cut-outs relate to pop-up books and paper engineering, and might even function as page flaps to attach the bookmark. The cut-outs representing windows allow the text to peep through, as well as provide horizontal markers for locating the last text read. While reflecting her artistic practice, these bookmarks also work just as pure bookmarks. Be sure to visit the Participating Artists page to see even more entries plus different views of those highlighted here. As with all art, I hope these creative bookmarks “made you look” as well as think about books and reading, memories, nature, art and finding the way. For more information: Previous BiblioBuffet columns:
Laine Farley is a digital librarian who misses being around the look, feel and smell of real books. Her collection of over 3,000 bookmarks began with a serendipitous find while reviewing books donated to the library. Fortunately, her complementary collection of articles and books about bookmarks provides an excuse for her to get back to libraries and try her hand at writing about bookmarks. Contact Laine.
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