Thursday 16th September | 17:00 - 19:00 | Online
What is distinctive about the artist’s book as a form of creative self-exploration and communication? Since the 1960s, the artist’s book has been an innovative and versatile medium of expression, as well as a radical way of bringing art to a wider public. This talk and workshop will explore artists’ books from the ‘Prescriptions’ collection (University of Kent) that is dedicated to the topics of illness and wellbeing. We will reflect on how contemporary artists reimagine the book format to give voice to intimate experiences, craft multisensory stories about health and illness, and challenge medical hierarchies. Participants will also be guided to create a handmade book to capture aspects of their own lived experience.
Dr Stella Bolaki is Reader in Medical Humanities in the School of English at the University of Kent and Director of Kent’s MA programme in Medical Humanities. She is the author of Illness as Many Narratives: Arts, Medicine and Culture (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), which explores representations of illness across different art forms. The interdisciplinary and collaborative project “Artists’ Books and Medical Humanities” she led from 2016 to 2019 helped establish the “Prescriptions: Artists’ Books” special collection, based at the University of Kent’s Templeman Library.
About the session:
In advance of the session, you will need an A3 card paper (of any colour) and a pair of scissors. Please also gather materials that will help with crafting a handmade book (see below) or anything else that relates to the themes of health, illness and wellbeing.
If you wish, you can watch the short documentary film I Make Books by Martha A. Hall (18 min). This is a moving documentary on how American artist Martha Hall used the artist’s book format to document her illness experience and communicate with the medical community.
Indicative materials (for the making part of the workshop):
If you enjoy drawing or painting etc, you can have with you colouring pencils, sketches you can incorporate, illustrations and any other relevant art supplies. If you have any basic tools for bookbinding (such as a bone folder, needles/thread, pricker etc) you can bring those, but they are not essential.
A range of printed papers/materials with image and/or text which could be collaged or made into whole pages. E.g:
Packaging, wrapping paper, fabric
Photographs
Digital prints/internet printouts
Old books, newspapers, magazines
Paper with a range of textures, transparencies, uses, and contexts
Other materials, that could be collaged, used to produce marks/texts, or bound within, or act as pages in themselves. E.g:
Ribbon, strings, embroidered material, fabric, threads, cords, buttons or other small objects to glue or sew into a book or to store your book in (such as a box).
Stationary: staplers, rubberstamps, stickers etc.
The session will last two hours and will include a short break. Please feel free to drop in and out throughout this time - there will be no pressure to share your work or participate in discussion if you do not wish to.