While we’re still in the first month of the new year, what better time to look at a few of the newest additions to the Artists’ Books Collection at the ECU Library! We’ll be looking at five artists’ books that are new on our shelves, on a range of different topics, all by different artists.
Our first read is Herbal First Aid (Assembling a Natural First Aid Kit) by Raleigh Briggs. This welcoming pamphlet-sized book gives readers the inside scoop on how to assemble their very own herbal first aid kits, through equipment checklists, medical instructions, and salve recipes. Briggs’ guide to herbal first aid covers a multitude of injury and illnesses, from cuts, scrapes, gut problems, aches, pains, burns, rashes, bruises, bleeding, to even parasites. This economical zine opens up the accessibility of medical aid through the use of natural resources. On the last page, Briggs compiles a list of online and local Seattle resources for acquiring materials, as well as some general recommendations for sources, like local co-ops and health food stores. Briggs’ lighthearted illustrations and handwritten text makes the subject of first aid feel both personal and attainable.
Notes on Mother Tongues by
Notes on Mother Tongues by Mirene Arsanios is a commissioned piece from a twenty-pamphlet series published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2020, where twenty authors were asked to write about “collective work, translation, performance, pedagogy, poetics, and small press publishing” (from UDP Website). In this fictional essay, Arsanios writes about the loss of her own mother tongue, and its connections to colonialism and motherhood. Arsanios’ writing poetically flows through the historical events and individual experiences that inform her personal relationship to language and region. Along with Mirene Arsanios’ Notes on Mother Tongues, all twenty published pamphlets from the series are in our collection and are now available to explore.
No new theories by
Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s book, No New Theories, is a new eye-catching work on the shelf this year. The book has page after page of fragmented monochrome poems and abstracted photocopies examining the language of artificial intelligence. These complicated text translations are juxtaposed with black-and-white photographs, some of the images being found and others photographed by Rasheed. The book also has an annotated interview between Rasheed and Jessica Lynne, co-founder of ARTS.BLACK, where they discuss their own relationships to research, knowledge, and pedagogy. The written interview shows both Rasheed and Lynne’s annotations on top of the original, adding to the interview’s content with new ideas and references. No New Theories echoes Rasheed’s installation art practice, where she’s known to cover large expanses of public spaces using the same abstracted methods used in this artist book.
100 Days of Bulimia by Janet Ford is a small, yellow, coil-bound book illustrating the author’s personal experience of living with an eating disorder. Using 100 pages of simple sketches, the book touches on routines and relationships affected by Bulimia. Ford uses the approachability of the illustrations and the book’s form to recount the deeply personal reality of silently living with a decades long eating disorder. One page features a bundle of bananas with Ford’s text, “I’m sorry I yelled at you for helping yourself to one of my bananas… But they were the only food I could safely eat that week.” The coil bound form of 100 Days of Bulimia replicates the appearance of a calendar, letting viewers understand the longevity of living with an eating disorder for 100 days.
Leading Actors N-Z, Volume 12 by Denise Hawrysio features an ambiguous yet intriguing front cover. The silhouette of a person’s head, the face replaced by a void of layered patterns, with a string of text along the bottom that reads, “Height 5 feet 11 inches, Hazel Eyes, Arthur Thompson, 1992”. Leading Actors N-Z, Volume 12 comes from Denise Hawrysio’s The Spotlight Project, where Hawrysio, using an old Spotlight, a casting directory for actors, decided to cut out the faces of all the sitters, as a way to set their souls free. The idea came when Hawrysio learnt that some cultures believe that the photographic process is disrespectful to the spiritual world, stealing the soul of the subject captured in the image. Each actor’s headshot features the same string of information along the bottom, describing their height, eye color, name, and date of headshot. Hawrysio compiled these faceless portraits, binding them back into books, and rephotographed the portraits to reveal the layers below. These photographs were then made into several volumes, where viewers are left to flip through long tunnels of faceless people whose souls have been set free.
This is just a few of the new artists’ books in our collection that are available to view this new year!
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