The new book I am working on at the moment started with an
invitation from the artist/publisher Martha Hellion to take up a residency in
Mexico. It was an incredible experience. Martha introduced me to Mexico City
and all things Mexican. From her home and studio I was able to explore the city
and visit museums learning something of the richness of Mexican Art and Craft.
Together with Martha and Lilly Duering, an Argentinian artist friend of
Martha’s I then traveled to Edward James’s garden Las Pozas, a 7 hours bus
journey north of Mexico City, up and over mountainous desert, through the
Sierra Gorda and down into tropical landscape.
The garden was an extraordinary amalgamation of jungle
vegetation and man-made sculptural architecture, designed and constructed by
the English surrealist Edward James and his Mexican craftsmen over many years.
The garden enveloped in its magnitude and the buildings tested one in their
dizzy structures. Their shapes echoed and enhanced the plants and trees that
surrounded them. And the whole fused to create an incredible sensory experience
of alert seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, moving and being.
I spent 8 days exploring the garden with my camera,
wandering, getting lost, rewinding and refinding. I had never experienced such
powerful soaring succulent vegetation in my life.
As for the magnificent Staircase to
Heaven, with vertiginous double spiral staircase and connecting bridge, the
tiered walkways with splitting paths and the mysterious arches and open
windows, - the latter really reminded me of Spanish/Mexican artist Remedios
Varo’s paintings.
As I wandered, I wondered how on earth I
might translate such magnitude of scale, vertiginous height and depth, such profusion, brilliance and intricacies into a
book. In my previous books I have always worked with a more manageable scale,
so dealing with the vastness of this garden was a new experience for me, and an
opportunity to think about my process, presenting a challenge to me.
I took many photographs of the garden, and once I had
gathered enough I returned to my studio in Scotland where I began the process
of thinking more concretely in terms of the book, following my usual process-
that is starting by making contact sheets of all the images I had taken. The
contact sheets allow me to get an overview of the entirety of the material I
have gathered, they constitute an organized archive through which I can journey
quickly and at ease and get an idea of the themes, my shifting pre-occupations,
as well as the specific quality of shape and colour, the patterns and textural
materiality within the images.
After that I began printing out a selection of images.
I have always loved these early stages of the process, when originally with
analogue I would have all the photographs to hand, in the box as it were, and
look at them anew, away from the subject, as though in a reverie, seeing new
things in them for the first time. Now, in a more digital world, my images
exist at first on a computer screen, but I still try to print out as much as I
can, even if it ends up being very expensive. These prints constitute my raw
material, the beginning of the next stage in my thinking process: holding the
printed image in my hands is the necessary starting point from which to make
decisions about any of my books. Unlike a wordsmith I can’t pluck an image out
of thin air.
I usually decide on the size of the book very early
on, but in this case, given the enormous scale of the garden that was my
subject matter - vast leaves, large panoramas, vertiginous view points - I kept
several folders for different size prints and different scales, allowing myself
to move between them along the way. When looking at the images and groups of
images printed out in different sizes I started noticing how the different sizes
created a different feeling in the hand, and how they provoked different ways of
looking at and within the book: the larger ones provided for a broader sweep
for the hand and eye, working better from a distance, whereas the smaller ones
made the subject shimmer almost like a jewel in the hand.
Once I had my images, I began composing what I call
“phrases”, sequences of four quite large landscape format printed images that
follow one another, at first thinking that the book would eventually be
constituted by a number of independent phrases/folios. But as I kept working I
realized that there was a coherent narrative flowing from one phrase to the
next, and that I wanted the phrases to be connected to incorporate this
unfolding flow in the final book. That is when the issue of size and scale
really began to work itself out more urgently in my mind: a concertina is a far
more unmanageable object in the hand than a series of independent folio/phrases
or a double spread codex book! Thinking of the book as one continuous phrase,
rather than a collection of several shorter ones I began to have to consider
the practicalities of folding the pages, manually or by machine. This dilemma
also led to other dilemmas - which have continued - over methods of printing,
gains and losses: inkjet quality/hand folding, offset quality/machine,
press/sheet sizes and ultimately economics of production and economics of
purchase: who gets to hold such a book. All of this gymnastics does my head in.
So returning to the subject and physical joy (rather
than headache) of making my book, the garden was full of butterflies, birds and
sounds, but these were incredibly difficult to photograph. However in Mexico
City I spotted some old Mexican folk feather bird pictures that I just loved
and photographed and found a way to incorporate these vibrant beauties into my
version of the garden, giving them life in the garden and populating it within
my memory and imagination in a similar way to how Edward James had done in real
life when he came to Las Pozas, introducing his menagerie of birds, animals,
including deer, boas and alligators!
All the time I was in Mexico I was also very conscious
of wanting to evoke something of the ancient Mexican myth and include elements
of indigenous Indian tradition and wonderful craft of Mexico. I was really
moved by this. And wanted something of this feeling in my book. Martha is a
great expert in textiles and together we looked at weaving, embroidery and
beadwork made by Mexican Indians which I photographed and worked into my
pages, as a vital element and another level of colour and texture in my book.
In particular, I have attempted to translate with it that amazing and timeless
feeling I got in the garden-jungle of the plants and foliage almost dripping
over me. I have always loved textiles and the way they engage both eye and hand
in their appreciation. For me “working” each page in the book is in its way
analogous to the working of weaving and embroidery techniques: the eye and the
hand teasing out the printed image as colour and surface in relation to the
paper and the handling of the page. In this way the intimate nature of the book
and its making is honored and hopefully it makes for an interesting material
experience for the reader.
In relation to this intimacy, Frida Khalo’s small
miniature self-portrait made for the hand also inspired me: so small yet so
bold, I saw how this wonderful artist managed to combine such boldness of scale
with such delicacy, intricacy and decorative detail all within a painting no more
than 5cm high! Incredible. I thought if she managed to get such scale into such
a tiny work then there was hope for me with the garden in my book!
When I start working out the physical book I need to
consider so many issues: how to create the right tension and rhythm between the
images within the phrases and between the phrases themselves, what size of page
will work best for the image and subject matter, what distance do I want
between the viewer and book- intimate and close up or slightly more distanced
and table based. And then there is the agonizing consideration as to how to
print to ensure the colours and blacks are as intense and saturated as I want
them to be, and how to bind the phrases together so that the book will support
the narrative conceptually but also remain affordable and therefore reach a
wider audience, and so on. Printing methods are changing now and this affects
the decisions I make, both compositionally and conceptually and, eventually,
economically: whereas once I would have only been able to print 4 colour in
offset litho on a specific sheet size, I can now use inkjet printing. The
seduction of inkjet and its velvety matt black and intensity of colour makes it
hard to return or convert back to offset: on coated stock with shine or
uncoated with inevitable die back. But the former inkjet is very costly and
hard to register back and front, and makes for small print runs and costly
books. Offset makes for an affordable multiple if printing a larger edition. Depending on what I want and accepting differences there are different ways to
realize the final printed book. It may be with this book that I output the
narrative in two different sizes and print mediums, acknowledging the
oscillating way I have been working and the dilemma I have found myself in.
Both are relevant.
This book, like every one of my books before it, is an
entirely new project for me, a place in which to pour my visual world anew. The
beauty of a book is it can be opened and explored. You can lead the reader into
the place of your vision - precisely where you want them to be - and then leave
them there or bring them out. The cover closed, the place is safely held within
the book and put on a shelf, awaiting to be discovered again. Within the
constraint of a double page with a centre fold you can discipline your vision,
contain and pace your whole visual universe in sequence. What is important for
me about the book is the possibility to hold it in your hands, the condensed
containment of that, and the intensity of material looking that this
facilitates.
