Jack Ginsberg Centre for Book Arts

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

Opening

16 September 2025

Opening talk Prof Isabel Hofmeyr

Gaia: Dialogues between the book arts, natural sciences & plant humanities
Opening address, JGCBA, Wits Art Museum, 16 September 2025
Prof. Isabel Hofmeyr (Professor Emeritus, University of the Witwatersrand)

This beautiful and ambitious exhibition takes the idea of Gaia (a term for interacting planetary ecosystems – the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the lithosphere) and puts it together with that most human of measures, the book and the page. Phrased differently, we can say that this exhibition immerses the book in the biosphere, the zone or envelope of life stretching from the deep sea-vents up into the atmosphere. This exhibition plunges the book into the worlds of plants, animals, air, minerals, water, ice, rock, soil and mud.

To think about books in the biosphere is to immediately confront questions of scale. How does one fit these huge, infinite systems, whether of atmosphere, weather, wind, or ice onto the human space of the page. The exhibition comprises 149 works in all: 105 books, 30 artworks and 14 natural sciences materials (posters, herbaria and displays). Each illuminates a different way of approaching this central problem of scale and representation. Each illuminates some aspect of the biosphere, using different techniques, material and media. In doing so, each work ask us to think about different forms of life in newly attentive ways. The ingenious methods used equally open up new understandings and definitions of the book as an expressive form, and how we might think about it in the age of climate change.

The first point to note is the extraordinary abundance of the exhibition which overflows with birds, beasts, fish, fowl, insects, plants, flowers, sand, soil, rock, moon, stars and much more. It's like a cross between a delightful menagerie and an abundant botanical conservatory, with some geology and meteorology thrown in. You'll meet the African Grey Parrot, the birds of Manhattan, and the Blackpoll warbler, the smallest bird to cross the Atlantic. You'll encounter the most exquisite New Zealand ferns and a remarkable cycad florilegium. You'll encounter other plants, some pulped to make paper, others dried and pressed, yet others, etched, painted, or printed on paper. Watch out for insect tracks, grass hoppers, damselflies, bees and worms. You'll encounter representations of the wind, the moon, water and ice, as well as actual soil laminated on paper. It is as if these books are the opposite of Pandora's box which, when opened released curses and evil upon the world. Here the blessings and munificence of the biosphere flow out from these opened volumes.

As I've noted, the works grapple with questions of scale, and they do this at different levels: from insects, to plants, to soil, to vast weather systems. How are these to be represented within the affordances of the codex? How do these pieces use the form and mechanics of the book itself: the page, the hinge, the fold, the binding and so on.

Take for instance the fold, especially apparent in process of expanding and contracting the accordian-fold books. Gail Behrman's concertina booklet ‘Journey Beyond the River and into the Trees' explores landscape as both space but also as time – time required to walk through, or comprehend a landscape. To unfold this leporello involves time which enacts in miniature the process of comprehending a landscape (and then perhaps forgetting it, as one folds up the peaks and valleys of the concertina).

In Eugene Hon's accordion booklet, ‘Read, Peep, Reap', the central subject, an iris flower, morphs into smaller and smaller and smaller fractal patterns, reminding us about the different levels of knowing a plant, for example down to its cellular structure or biochemistry.

Another material feature of the page is its sizing, the substance applied to paper to reduce its tendency to absorb liquids, allowing inks and paints to remain on the surface. Jocelyn S Webb's piece entitled ‘Winter Light' (based on the poem by Emily Dickinson) works with an original ink drawing on paper that has then been submerged in bees wax which we can think about as a type of sizing, albeit somewhat unusual. The Dickinson poem was then letterpress printed directly into the wax, a material that can be scratched and damaged, making the words vulnerable to erasure. The words, apparently ‘on' the page may disappear in time as the wax is damaged, making us think about what it would mean to have a book with no words in it.

Another important feature of any book is of course binding. A piece by US hand papermakers, Peter and Donna Thomas, called ‘Paper from Plants' gathers together sheets of paper made from local plants in their area. As the exhibition label indicates, the binding of the volume has been shaped by the plant matter in its pages. As the exhibition label indicates, the book is bound with stab stitching “sewn through an accordion folded gutter, uniquely developed for this book that allows samples to expand and contract with changes in humidity without damaging neighbouring sheets”.

Across the exhibition, several pieces use an obvious feature of the page, namely that it is turned in sequence, making one page lie on top of the other. Several works cut or alter the page, creating cumulative and changing images, as the pages are turned. As the exhibition label indicates, Katsumi Komagata's book ‘A Cloud' uses paper of different textures and weights containing die cuts of cloud shapes that layer upon each other, creating a sense of cloud time. Another book entitled ‘Hole: From my beanstalk' by Ryoko Adachi simulates worm-eaten pages through cutouts which layer upon each other, creating a worm's eye view of, and in the book. Another volume entitled ‘The Making and Unmaking of the World' by Ann Tyler has punched out riddled leaf shapes with a half-inch diameter punch which then reveal and conceal each other, as one leafs through the volume.

These volumes suggest new meanings for the phrase ‘leaf through a book'. Together, they imply a leaf, or leaves threaded through a codex, or, as we see elsewhere on the exhibition, leaves and plant matter embedded, encased or pressed in and on pages, or used to make the paper itself.

This close association of plant and book is not surprising. The two have long been linked, materially, linguistically and metaphorically. As Leah Knight (2009), an early modernist notes, verbals and herbals have been entwined, whether through flax in paper, covers made from wood, gall for ink, or reeds for pen. Parts of the book, like leaves and sheaves were named for the plant world, while anthologies were likened to gardens and vice versa. Plant illustration (whether of early herbal handbooks or botanical illustration) has been central to the growth of the early publishing industry in 16th and 17th England.

At the same time, this presence of plants in and on paper reminds us of the organic nature of the page. We seldom think about the plants, animals and minerals in the books we read, often because these are kept at bay by electricity and air-conditioning, especially in libraries and archives. Yet, the proximity of pressed plant and page, in this exhibition are powerful reminders that books are organic. If supplies of electricity and air-conditioning cannot be assured, especially in humid contexts, then what might some of these books and herbarium sheets start to look like? Several of the pressed plants contain seeds which, with enough moisture could start to sprout, possibly returning the page back to the fibres from which it was made. This would be a victory for the plant but not for us bibliophiles. Nonetheless the organic nature of books reminds us that both they and us will not last forever.

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