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Isabel Hofmeyr

Johannesburg

PRINTING WITH BOOKS I (2016)

Type of book work: Unique / sculptural book-object (one-of-a-kind)
Dimensions: 1500 x 750
Media: Books, paper and acrylic

Artist's / designer's statements

I am an academic with a book problem. I work on print culture and books and grapple with their meanings as social objects. As an academic, I have too many books and struggle to keep the rising tide of volumes at bay.

A productive solution to my book problem emerged when I joined Bronwen Findlay's art class. Bronwen encourages everyone to pursue their own interests and the class is an inspiring congregation, each person doing something completely different.

Tired of yet again lugging a load of books to the charity store, I decided one day to see if I could use the book as a type of paint brush. Long interested in the anatomy of the book, I was curious to see to what ends its materiality could be coaxed.

The procedure involved grasping the spine of the book and 'buttering' the foredge with acrylic and then smearing the book across the page. Books are material objects. They have heft, odour and texture. They carry marginalia and bus tickets. Their materiality gives them afterlives - as trunk linings, door stops or cigarette papers. The technique used here adds another afterlife by turning the book into a printing implement. The books are saturated and then shaped into spidery forms.

PRINTING WITH BOOKS II (2016)

Type of book work: Unique / sculptural book-object (one-of-a-kind)
Dimensions: 1500 x 750
Media: Books, paper and acrylic

Artist's / designer's statements

Paint is applied to the top or bottom of the book and impressed on paper. The technique produces pelagic, marine-like images, a far cry from the solidity that we associate with books - yet another metamorphosis of the book and its surprising materialities.

To produce these images, several books were entirely saturated in water. The excess water was squeezed out and the books moulded into various shape and left to dry. Paint was applied to the top or bottom end of the book and was then impressed on paper.

The resulting painting was then named after the book that had made it: my earliest efforts included "The Autobiography of William Cobbett", "Rebellion and Revolution" and "Sophie's World".

Book history as an academic discipline has long explored the book as object - as gift, as interior decoration, as way of negotiating social relationships, as talismanic object, as embodiment of imperial (and anti-imperial) power, as religious fetishes and so on. This technique of 'book marking' demonstrated another type of afterlife and another trajectory of booknesses.



Academic / Writer

Isabel Hofmeyr is Professor of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand and Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. Her award-winning books include Gandhi's Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading (Harvard University Press, 2013); Ten Books that Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons (Duke University Press, 2014), co-edited with Antoinette Burton; and The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim's Progress (Princeton University Press, 2004). She has written extensively on transnational print culture and book history. This is her first exhibition.



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