Mary Minicka

Cape Town

DIRGE WITHOUT MUSIC, POEMS BY EDNA ST VINCENT MILLAY (2016)

Type of book work: Unique / sculptural book-object (one-of-a-kind)
Dimensions: 110 x 105 x 19
Media: Artist's watercolour paper; bookbinder's grey board, "crashed canvas" bookbinding cloth, PVA Glue, acrylic ink Handwritten with a steel nib

Artist's / designer's statements

A rendering of the poem "Dirge without music", by Edna St Vincent Millay.

This work is specifically a departure from the other book I entered into the Colloquium. I wanted to create a book where actual text was used, as opposed to an imagined text. The challenge was to then create a suitable physical embodiment of the poem. I wanted to use the meandering accordion format to literally enfold the poem's different lines within each other to create a sense of the circularity of the grieving process.

The full text of the original poem used is available: www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/52773

VOLUME ELEVEN OF THE CHRONICLES AND COLLECTED CORRESPONDENCES OF THE CLOTH MERCHANT ON PONDER ROAD (2016)

Type of book work: Unique / sculptural book-object (one-of-a-kind)
Dimensions: 130 x 115 x 57
Media: Commercially produced leather (red and textured brown), bookbinder's linen sewing thread; reclaimed pins and sewing thread from archival records undergoing conservation repair, 120 gsm commercially available paper stock, shweshwe and other cloth samples, thread samples, recycled vintage glassine paper, acrylic inks - amongst others

Artist's / designer's statements

This work is inspired by my work as a conservator of archival records. The idea was to create a fictional archive. This archive is not necessarily readable or accessible to understanding, as is often the case when encountering historical documents in other languages (or in archaic language forms) which makes comprehension and establishment of an ordered timeline difficult. Archival records are often only a partial record, contingent on the vagaries of human agency, creation and preservation tactics.

Artist / Bookbinder / Conservator Education 2003 Bachelor of Arts Degree, University of South Africa 1993 Diploma in Fine Binding and Book Conservation Guildford College of Technology, Guildford, Surrey, United Kingdom 1990 National Diploma in Library and Information Services Cape Technikon, Cape Town Conservator Internships and Projects 1992 Deutsches Historiches Museum, Berlin, Germany 1993 Seminario Barbarigo, Montefiascone, Italy 2000 Genadendal / South African conservation and Preservation Group (SAPCON) volunteer project, Moravian Mission Museum, Genadendal, Western Cape 2001 Library of Congress, Washington DC, United States of America 2002 Timbuktu Manuscripts Project, Timbuktu, Mali / Cape Town, South Africa