Annually, for eight years, Noosa Regional Gallery has presented an exhibition of artists' books. Together with 'Floating Land', the 'Bookworks' exhibition is among the most popular and anticipated exhibitions presented on the Sunshine Coast. In 2004 'Bookworks' was themed around 'Nature' and artists responded with works that examined everything from natural materials to human nature. How, where, does one begin in thinking about nature in book form? In turn, what is the nature of the artist's book? Such are the questions that this exhibition raises through its array of works which includes conceptual, text-based and sculptural works.
It is in these myriad inquiries, we see that the book is an agglomeration of multiple media, yet remains quite a resilient form. As a form, even in its undoing, even when it is an 'un-book' or an 'anti-book', it is still critically a book. It can still be a book because it folds or opens or communicates, like Natalie Hartog's cube puzzles or Marianne Little's book of torn away pages or Mayrah Yarrage Driesc's 'message stick' featuring her letter to a white person. It can still be a book because it contains, like the wood and perspex boxed works by Rob Duffield and Laura McKew in which sand and toy plastic soldiers can be shaken to reveal texts such as 'it's natural for children to play games at the beach' and 'it's natural for adults to lie'. It can still be a book because it collects, such as Judy Barrass's In their nature, a traditionally bound book, in which she has collected, not in any particular order, a series of cultural and ethnic stereotypes such as 'bystanders are innocent'