INTRODUCTION

This exhibition of artists' books is an exploration of the 'betwixt and between.' To open a book is to enter a liminal space - a threshold positioned between the spark of an idea and the permanence of the printed mark. While traditional publishing often aims to present 'finished' knowledge, the works in this exhibition reveal the act of thinking as it happens. Here, the page is not merely a surface for recording; it is a field of thinking.

A thoughtform is the physical manifestation of an internal cognitive process; it is the moment an idea ceases to be abstract and becomes a mark. Historically, marginalia served as a dialogue between the reader and the text, a way of 'thinking back' to the author. Before the printing press, the page was not considered a sacred, untouchable space, but a site of active conversation. In the era of Incunabula (books printed before 1501), margins were intentionally wide to invite the reader's input. The works explored here reclaim this older tradition, where the reader or artist is an active participant in the book's meaning.

To look at a 1475 copy of Seneca's Opera Philosophica is to see a pre-industrial mind at work. Before the clean page took hold, the reader was expected to be a co-author. These pages often bloom with maniculae (pointing hands), glosses (explanatory notes), and hand-inked underlining. This was the highlighter of the 15th century, where the act of reading was a physical intervention, a literal thinking back to Seneca across a millennium.

In a leap forward to 1964, we encounter Max Ernst's Maximiliana ou L'Exercice Illégal de L'Astronomie. This collaboration with poet/publisher Iliazd honours the 19th-century self-taught astronomer Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel, whose discovery of an asteroid was ignored by the scientific elite. Ernst combines intricate etchings of celestial bodies with asemic writing - symbols that resemble elegant handwriting but possess no semantic content. This is a visual performance of 'illegal' astronomy. The pages do not offer verifiable data, but rather a rhythmic language that mimics the swirling patterns of the stars. In Maximiliana, the line between scientific diagram and surrealist doodle vanishes, capturing the velocity of a mind reaching for the stars through a purely internal logic.

The exhibition traverses diverse typologies of the thoughtform, moving from the analytical to the obsessive. The traditional architecture of annotations, footnotes, and endnotes is transformed into an avant-garde visual language where the page becomes the primary site of inquiry. This field expands into Visual Mapping, where the diagram and the doodle are reimagined as central to artistic logic. Finally, the exhibition investigates Redaction and Cancellation, proving that thinking is as much about what we discard as what we keep.

The exhibition invites you to consider the messy and generative pathways where imagination takes physical form. Ultimately, a thoughtform is the residue of creative navigation - the cross-outs, ink blots, and spatial arrangements that reveal an artist searching for a solution. To view these works is to stand at the boundary where an idea finally finds its body.