Things change, you know

Egidija Ciricaite, Chris Gibson, Wiebke Kowal, Jukhee Kwon, Laura S Turull, Natalie Yiaxi 

  

All set up now!

Burning books - why???!!!

I do not burn them because I have a problem with books and written word. I do not burn them as a political statement.


I reduce books to the fragility of an empty crab shell, not only because it is a book, but especially because of it's indexality (Charles Sanders Peirce). Those books that I fire are very much representative of their times. Not only for the truths they contain. The books also hold ink, dust, fingerprints, pigments, coffee stains, pencil marks and other residue from that specific moment. So I cremate them, purge them of the memories and thoughts. I reduce their materiality and their content to such fragility, that they may disintegrate in hands, just like the memory of the times that they represent. The beauty of death.

Firing books comes from my research into memory, identity, language and aesthetics. My firing practice is not there only to speak about books. It is also there to raise questions about memory, identity, historical truth, our links with past and the fragility of those links.

This is why I burn books.










Well - this is what I think. I am sure Freud would have a more exciting explanation.

New Post No1

Last week I spent a few days organizing my sketch-books, notes, notebooks, scraps of paper, post-it-notes, photos, pages from the magazines and newspaper, press releases, samples, links - oh, and everything else that has an ability to accumulate and pile up!

Anyway, I have decided to start putting some of the stuff on the blog, to keep more space on my shelves.

About me:
At the moment I am studying for an MA in Book Arts at Camberwell College of Arts. My background is in linguistics. My main interests lie in
1. memory: it's ephemerality, fragility of it, loss of it; memory and identity, the links to the past, changes in those links.
2. interpretation of art: art as language; translating thought into visual and verbal; the way language entraps our thinking; Wittgenstein; relationship between object and concept and word; mapping meaning; etc.
3. things absent, unsaid, erased, gone and therefore assumed, supposed, inferred
4. pretend reality
5. things secret, private, hidden and dark.
6. things morbid and whimsical, like Gastlycrum Tinies by Edward Gorey.
7. things that Ghibli does.
8. all sorts of other stuff I may have forgotten now.


My work ranges between the work on paper to ceramics (and a combination of both): drawings/collages, books, firing books, ceramics.