GAIA Dialogues between the book arts, natural sciences & plant humanities


Foreward


Jack Ginsberg
Director of the Jack Ginsberg Centre for Book Arts, Wits Art Museum, University of the Witwatersrand

It was in 2004 when I received a phone call from David Paton who was a lecturer in the Department of Visual Art, University of Johannesburg, telling me that I had been ‘allocated’ a student for me to tutor. This was apparently part of the Workplace Learning component, required as part of their Honours degree at the time. I protested that I was not a teacher and asked what on earth I would be able to teach one of their students. A few weeks after having lost the argument, I was introduced to Ros who proceeded to change my life. Ros also went on to complete her Master’s degree at UJ in 2008. I hadn’t known how much I needed someone like Ros to help with my various art interests. I had long been a collector of books and art and was working on several projects with the Wits Art Museum (WAM) which were to come to fruition almost a decade later. From 1996, The Ampersand Foundation, my civil-society project, established a residency program for South African artists to visit New York and Ros helped develop this project. She was granted a residency herself in 2016 during which she visited the original Centre for Book Arts in New York where she investigated what we succeeded in emulating three years later in 2019.

I introduced Ros to my database system developed for cataloguing both art and artists' books and the peculiarities of cataloguing them, at which she became adept in no time and soon sorted out the art collection and began on the books. Ros and I became firm friends, and I learnt as much from her as she did from me. We seldom disagreed even though I had a lot to learn about her life-affirming interest in Gaia and particularly in spiders and rhinos. In 2018, negotiations started with Wits for a Centre to be built for the housing of my artist's book collection. Ros was crucial in designing the space and working with the architects and cabinetmakers on the design of the vitrines, furniture and bookcases, whereafter, we started the seemingly impossible task of moving all the books from my home to the Centre for Book Arts before its opening in 2019. It took almost three months for us to move over 12,000 books in our cars to avoid having to wrap each one, which would have been necessary, had we hired carriers. In March 2019 the exhibition Samplings launched the Centre for Book Arts which overflowed into the downstairs gallery at WAM and in July of that year, Ros was appointed as the Senior Librarian at the Centre. Her love of teaching also resulted in her starting the make-a-book series of workshops where, on Saturday mornings, together with others, she taught aspects of bookmaking to enthusiasts of all ages.

There were many overseas visitors at the opening of the Centre and Ros organised a trip to the Kruger National Park for those who had never visited South Africa. They all had rhinos at the top of their list, and I can attest that we saw many. This was followed in September 2022 when Ros again organised a trip, this time to the Pilanesberg, for three overseas visitors for whom we had organised an exhibition at the Centre. I had not expected Ros to be such an expert spotter: as we entered the park, just inside the gate there were two rhinos. Miraculously our visitors were able to tick off virtually every species in the park and seemed to think that this was normal. Over time I learned a lot more about Ros' interest in animals and plants and many of her favourite artists' books explored the theme of Gaia (after the Greek goddess of the Earth).

In 2022 Ros accompanied me, together with book-artists from the USA and Vienna to the CODEX Book Arts Fair in San Francisco when we brought back over 100kg of books for the Centre in four suitcases; I could never have managed it without her. During this trip we were both privileged to meet Claudia Cohen who, together with Barbara Hodgson, created Paper Botanists (2021), one of our botanical treasures on this exhibition (pg.36). She presented it to us personally, paging through the entire book and describing the complexity of its manufacture over a period of a year. Artists' books can be about any subject which makes our collection different from most specialist collections, but it is surprising how many are related to nature. Their appeal to me over many years was probably aesthetic or innovative: I think, however, that I shall never see a volume lovely as a tree!

Ros changed my life as I'm sure she did many others, endearing herself to all who knew her. She was selfless, generous and kind, and had the very unusual characteristic of being self-effacing: she did not like being photographed! Ros had been planning an exhibition at the Centre - tentatively called Gaia. After her passing late last year we decided to run with her idea and dedicate this exhibition to her. As a realization of her idea, this exhibition is a tribute to her life, both in her love of the earth, and her love of art and artists' books.


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