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.
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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 and professional engagement
I graduated with a Ph.D. in 2010 on the subject of artists' books, enititled Becoming What the Book Makes Possible: Aspects of metaphorisation of identity and practice in artists' books, examining aspects of how the practice of working with artists'books affected artists' creativity and ideas of the roles they were playing in the artwork's creation. (You can download the thesis here)
I subsequently graduated with distinction from an Information and Library Management MSc in 2012, gaining a professional qualification in the libraries field that brought together aspects of my interests in artists' books, mediation and creativity, and the history (and future) of the book. (My MSc thesis was about the use of artists' books in libraries and how users encountered them, relating to how the disruptive 'surprise and delight' artists' books offer can help engage library users' critical awareness and information literacy.)
I hope eventually to work professionally in the library field, (I have been employed in libraries in various settings since 1998) working with artists' books in academic and public settings. Most recently I was engaged as a research consultant for SWRLS - the South Western region Library Service - investgating an aspect of specialist stock acquisition and usage.
Personal reasons mean that I am not currently (Spring 2013) able to pursue major changes in my employment or home base, but I remain interested in professional and creative development opportunities. Please do get in touch if you have an opportunity you think would be of interest to me.
Thanks for stopping by.
— æ
news
thinking about Wilson Art Full Text
Having a play about with the Wilson art full text database. I used it a lot for my Fine Art PhD but not so much subsequently in the information and library management MSc. It’s interesting to look at from a different perspective now, trying to see if it makes any sense to have it for the public library in Bristol. It would be a wonderful reference resource, but is definitely more useful for academic research than for browsing, even though it has a fair amount of pdf full text (and hence, reproduction after a fashion, of the visual material). I’m remembering Susie Cobbledick’s research about the information practices of artists and others on what artists want from libraries, and it comes down to having the (usually physical) materials available to form up into whatever process is right for the artist – and this may differ pretty widely from academic/ information literacy-type practices familiar elsewhere.
That said, there are some art journals that really cater more for theory and research than they really offer to artists, and its the extent to which Wilson offers these that it’s really useful. I could envisage replacing some of these physical subs with digital ones, and even envisage – subject to the usual caveats about the ongoing relationship with the provider – the possibility of disposing of some old back runs of more-commonly-held, more ‘research-y’ back runs.
It would certainly amplify the research potential of the art library, especially given its strength in monographs over the last 25-30 years. I don’t think it would necessarily help the artist-researcher as much, geared as it is to a more academic approach – though I may be mistaken there, too. So long as it wasn’t taken as a signal to dispense with the more visually-oriented subs (and I’m thinking not so much of the antiques and collectors’ subs here as much as the contemporary art and craft subs) I think it would be a real step forward.
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.