Featured Content: Whistling Copse
The Whistling Copse series of books on the portfolio pages concern an incident near Bath where a gamekeeper was shot by a poacher in the early years of the twentieth century. The books Twelve O'Clock Wood, Under the Wire and Safely Infer use images to explore notions of property, food and folk customs, and the epistemology that informs both the evidence of ownership, and the proofs offered thereby to prosecute theft, or, as is the case here, murder.
Different notions of place and use inhere in the worlds of poacher and owner, and in the truths offered by forensic epistemology and folk history.
The Whistling Copse books are my attempt to work with these ideas, through images of the landscape, its inhabitants, creatures and products, and through imagery adapted from contemporary newspapers and catalogues of hunting and shooting equipment.
An ongoing project, Whistling Copse raises themes that will continue in my work for some time to come.
welcome
Welcome to www.andreweason.com. I make artist's books. I write about them too. You can view lots of my work on this website.
I have also included resources including a large links directory, and a calendar of book art events that you can subscribe to.
portfolio
read my news
Essays, reviews and other writings are available here.
find out more
Find out more about me, Andrew Eason, through my resumé, statement and other contact materials.
Find out more about artists’ books through my extensive links directory.
— æ —research
I have spent the last few years researching and writing a Ph.D. on the subject of artists' books, enititled Becoming What the Book Makes Possible: Aspects of metaphorisation of identity and practice in artists' books.
I'm currently making the last few changes to the thesis and I've enrolled on a libraries MSc to gain a professional qualification in that field and to bring together aspects of my interests in artists' books, mediation and creativity, and the history (and future) of the book. I'm looking forward to taking another look at artists' books from within the institutions that collect them and make them available to the public.
Thanks for stopping by.
— æ
news
Thanks book-makers
Thank you to all the kids who took part in Instant Books! on the 16th April, and all the parents who stopped to give me such nice feedback. It was a blast to teach a completely different set of people, and, it has to be admitted, that I ended up developing some teaching materials that will probably come in very handy the next time I teach some adults!
With that in mind, I'll be tidying up and developing a new handout kit in the resources section for an accordion-fold book with some content, in the form of a set of 'continuous landscape' tip-ins that you can glue in. The idea being that each picture is continuous with any other one in the set. The fun of putting it into an open concertina is that you can continue to match up the 'pages' in new orders after the book is bound - hopefully some food for thought there for more advanced narrative uses too.
It's going to be a busy few weeks with exams and presentations for my Library MSc, but I will find time to put the new kit up in the next week or two.
Thanks again for your support.
Andrew.
You can read all my latest news, links and writing on Adminicle.
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Artist Books 3.0 is a forum for the discussion and promotion of the medium. It's currently a lively and interesting arena for debate and includes participants from all sorts of book art traditions.
book of the month
Turndust
A wind-miller has the duty to grind the meal so that the people living nearby can sell the produce they give him to grind and, indeed, so that they can earn their daily bread. Having had no wind to work with for weeks, and suddenly having some chance to do his work, he is tempted, even though he fears a storm. Should he risk the powerful machinery he is in charge of against the unknown? It may destroy him and the mill in the process.
In Turndust, I was able to use the windmill as a complex metaphor to discuss this in depth. Linguistically, wind-milling offers a range of interesting terminology that help give the writing texture and a specificity that helps me to distance the explicit description of visual events, cloaking them in language. Visually, the structure of the windmill itself is full of wood, beams, gears and a sense of a structure built to withstand enormous forces. A windmill is “built like a tank”. But the windmill also contains the means of its own destruction.
reviewing opportunity
Every month I will feature an artists' book in this column. At the moment I am featuring my own. If you would like me to feature one of yours, with a very brief review/description, please get in touch.