Barbara Steele

Artist's Bookworks

As part of my art practice I produce artist's bookworks.

Some are strongly linked with my site specific work since they document the projects. However, by becoming a handmade artist's bookwork,  they are transformed into a separate form of artwork.

 'A Sense of Place' series combines my photographic images

 and the words/poems/thoughts

 from the viewing public at the projects. 

'A Sense of Place: Rocombe Farm'

'I miss the cows, the dripping tongues, the smell of slippy shit'

image and text extracted from 'A Sense of Place: Rocombe Farm'

Prints are available from this bookwork (see print section)

'A Sense of Place: Brimblecombe's Cider Farm' 

'history/granite pillar/stillness'

image and text extracted from 'Brimblecombe's Cider Farm'

Prints are available from this bookwork (see print section)

'Traces' is a photographic exploration of the littoral

'Trace destined, like everything, to disappear from itself': Derrida

image and text extracted from 'Traces'

'Mirror Pool' is a photographic exploration of the elements

'surreptitiously/in the long grass/the mirror pool/catches the elements'

image and text extracted from 'Mirror Pool'

'Secrets', 'Con(s)ealed' and 'Fragments' are experimental explorations into the meaning of the word 'bookworks'

Con(s)ealed

joss paper with text and images sealed in wax and placed in perspex box

Fragments

burnt joss paper with text and images placed in perspex box

Secrets

shredded and/or bundled joss paper with text and images placed perspex box

Layers

This work took, as a starting point, the premise that pages in a book are layers that both reveal and conceal.

The images and text are short extracts from my two artist's books 'Traces' and 'Mirror Pool' 

which deal with surfaces, reflections, layers, fragments - revealing and concealing.

Printed on tracing paper, the images and text on both the current and subsequent layers

 are simultaneously revealed and concealed.