ESPECIALLY FOR YOU

Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison
Artists’ Books Exhibitions in the Bower Ashton Library cases
UWE, Bristol, UK
Remote residency
1 November – 30 November 2020

When Sarah Bodman from the Centre for Fine Print Research mentioned they’d like to feature our work in the cases of the Bower Ashton Library, our second thought, after the yay moment, was: let’s make a zine for people to print out at home. As with many things, this zine was soon one of two, because once we started, we thought: how about making a bat’s wing extend the length of a concertina. And so we have for you a pair of zines made-in-iso for you to download, print, fold, splice, share.

In the MET there is a “Pit from a Balanites tree with a hole caused by a rodent”, ca. 2381–2323 B.C., Old Kingdom, on view in Gallery 100.
Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison
2020
PDF download

We have been looking at you the wrong way round. We still do. To the gardeners of the sky.
Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison
2020
PDF download

Zine folding and splicing instructions
PDF download

University of West England (UWE) Bristol
City Campus at Bower Ashton
Kennel Lodge Road, Bristol BS3 2JT

Our work from the Special Collections and the CFPR Archives will be on display in the library cabinets for students to see, and pages virtually turned on the UWE Bristol Library’s Twitter feed.

During the timeframe of the exhibition here in Bristol, Sarah will be presenting a virtual talk on artists’ books and libraries for the Arlis/ANZ Biennial conference (Brisbane, 11–13 November): reimagining the material: artists’ books, printed matter, digital transformation, engagement. The talk will feature Gracia & Louise’s marvellous installation Looped, created specially for the La Trobe Reading Room at the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne.

Thank-you for the opportunity, Sarah, which we interpreted as an invitation to make something new. A zine about rodents, for amusement, and a zine about bats, for discussion. We were inspired by our Stage IV walks, more circular than our A to B days. We were inspired by early scientific drawings of bats the wrong way round for them and the ‘right’ way round for human eyes. We were thinking about how much we, as humans, encroach on the natural world to our collective detriment. We were thinking about the anthropogenic pressure on our most precious wild habitats.

On a related note, thank-you to Jess Cole, Assistant Curator, Prints and Drawings, at NGV, and NGV Melbourne, for the amazing opportunity to chat about our work with you as part of your live in-studio artist visits. We had an absolute ball chatting about artists’ books, animals, and those circular walks in stage IV, on screen, in REEL, and off screen, in our day to day. We enjoyed looking back at earlier works, like our artists’ book, The Company You Keep (2016), in your collection, and other prints and projects that have since flowed.

You can watch the full interview on the @NGVmelbourne IGTV channel.

This conversation on a Wednesday eve, at 7pm on the 7th of October, 2020, took place in the room in which you would normally find us working at that time of night. It is the room in which we made the collages on cabinet cards housed within The Company You Keep, on two drawing boards on the floor, adding a Nicobar pigeon (Caloenas nicobarica) to accompany someone’s Grandma Ferry. It is the room in which our twenty-plus-year collaborative work has been dreamt up and completed. Our home is our studio. It is where we are, so it is where we make; where our heads and heart and animal friends reside is all the space we need.

Thank-you, everyone, for taking an interest in our work, and accompanying us on our walks.

Image credit: Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison, We have been looking at you the wrong way round. We still do. To the gardeners of the sky (detail), 2020