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Each year for the past few years, Soapbox Gallery has presented an exhibition of artists' books and multiples. This event is one of the few that focuses on the artist book and each year, I am drawn into the pages and folds of those often delicate and uncanny works. This year, the exhibition, The Reading Room featured work by twenty-three artists. I wondered why I have never written about this practice before.
As an exhibition, The Reading Room did something interesting and was more like an installation than an exhibition. It displaced the comfort and certainty with which we read books. Rather than shelved or on tables, most of the 'books' were scattered on two, large plinths, no more than ten centimetres high. In order to engage and interact with these mostly folded works, I had to fold my body; squat, kneel or sit on the floor. This reading room did not cushion the body from its edges. Those works that were suspended, shelved, free standing or hung seemed peripheral. Unlike a library, this repository tor books was random and hybrid. Perhaps this reflected the uncertainty of the artist book. Simon Anderson observes that artist books 'are a hybrid form, neither quite object nor simply image, not necessarily textual but naturally serial; they offer individualized experiences but can do so within a standardised unit. This fascinating but hard-to-define state has affected their reception, and hence their fate in critical and historical tormulation.’1
A pair of white gloves was supplied with each book except Britt Knudson-Owens's blue dyed concertina and stitched books, Blue Phase Without Resist, which were complimented with a similarly dyed pair of gloves. The mottled colour