Martina Copley

Martina Copley is a freelance curator with over ten years experience in contemporary art and manager of Gallery 101, Melbourne. Her independent curatorial projects for commercial, public and artist-run spaces in Melbourne include Lexicon, an exhibition of small works on dictionary pages by fifty-seven artists for the City Library in Melbourne. She has recently curated a national touring exhibition entitled WALK and is also active as an arts writer and mentor for art students. Martina co-curates MAILBOX 141 a small public exhibition space in Flinders Lane.

Martina Copley’s comments for the Books…beyond words catalogue

Not only writers make books. Artists make books.

With its own literary and artistic lineage the idea of the book remains elusive and multivalent. Artists’ books are a kind of retro-technology, at once arcane and avant-garde – a material thinking with labyrinthine associations that intersects with a diversity of creative practice.

Playfully unencumbered, they celebrate a kind of incidental continuity and formal self-consciousness. Artists making books are free to explore the ‘thingness’ of the book; its cultural richness, formal idioms and conceptual understandings. Made for the hand or as exhibition piece, artists’ books invite participation and ‘unfold’ with the reader/viewer to enact the anatomy of our experience.

Johanna Drucker describes the living, collaborative, changing field of artists’ books as ‘emerging with many spontaneous points of origin and originality.’ Browsing the many eclectic offerings that form the exhibition Books …beyond words, confirms the rich potential of the book form.

Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books, Granary Books N.Y. 1995 p.11

Dr Brad Haylock

Dr Brad Haylock is a Lecturer in Visual Communication at Monash University. He practices as an artist, designer and writer. Recent projects include the solo exhibitions A Beginner’s Guide to Politics and Everything you never wanted to know about fashion at Vitrine/Platform, and the curation of Advance/Retreat (with Mark Richardson) at West Space and of Form and Discontent (with Misa Glisovic) and The Art of the Bicycle at Dont Come.

Dr Brad Haylock’s comments for the Books…beyond words catalogue

Artists’ engagement with the book form has a long and rich history. In the early twentieth century, for example, artists’ books represented an important means of sustaining artistic practice in unfavourable political climates, or of sharing ideas across borders.

It is the private scale and the portability of the book form which made the artist’s book significant in that era, and so too in the case of Books … beyond words. A book is (in most cases) eminently portable, yet it can capture and communicate almost any idea or practice; this award exhibition has certainly facilitated the coming together of artists diverse in their practices, their perspectives, their uses of media and their motivations for engaging with the book form.

I am pleased to have been able to support this initiative, which fosters the tradition of the artist’s book in all its diversity.

Robert Heather

Robert Heather is the Manager, Events and Exhibitions at the State Library of Victoria. He has worked extensively in the public galleries field in Australia and in his previous role as Director, Artspace Mackay established the Australian Artists’ Books forum and the Libris Awards for Artists’ Books.

Robert Heather’s comments for the Books…beyond words catalogue

The field of artists’ books is one which has growing appeal to many artists and the people they make works for – collectors, gallery visitors, educators and the general public. This exhibition provides a great opportunity to view a diversity of books by a wide range of leading artists from around Australia.

When you look at each book it is like viewing a miniature exhibition in itself. Often each page is a finished artwork, and most artists have also collaborated with other people – poets, writers, bookbinders – to bring the work to fruition. The artists have taken an enormous amount of time and effort to create this unique artistic experience for you – the viewer.

I hope that you enjoy this exhibition and take away from it a new appreciation of this artform and the tremendous variety of ways in which artists can approach the ‘humble’ book and create something spectacular.

Read Robert's blog notes on the Exhibition