HILARY LLOYD
Kunstmuseum, Basel

This publication represents the first monograph on the work of the Turner Prize nominated British artist. Designed to accompany her solo exhibition at the Kunstmuseum, Basel and the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead.

First published by Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Basel, Switzerland, 2012; edited, and with a foreword by, Nikola Dietrich; texts by Kirsty Bell, Sabeth Buchmann and Pablo Lafuente; 260 x 200 mm; 216 pp; 138 color images; softcover with open binding, front flap incorporating a dual language booklet for texts (German and English).

After many discussions with the artist around how work such as hers may be adequately represented on the printed page, the opportunity arose to carry this out through the kind auspices of Nikola Dietrich at the Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Basel.

The publication was to accompany the exhibition, but from the outset the motivation was to create a stand alone publication. Although any desire to provide an ‘equivalent’ to the work via the book would be clearly misguided, through the structuring and division of aesthetic content, distribution of the combination of differing papers, semi-wayward cropping of the images, concealing/intrusion of the captions, and finally the nearly-fragile collating, binding and finishing, the finished object might hopefully go some way to reflecting the spirit of the artist’s lightness of touch, conceptual rigour and approach to image making (or rather, lived experience and its representation through images).

Exhibition context (from the gallery press release): “The furtive eye of Lloyd’s camera records scenes of urban life, among other objects, illuminating the modern city as a site of voyeurism, fetishism, and sexual ambivalence. People engaged in everyday rituals and routine gestures of self-projection draw the artist’s interest, as do architecture, advertising, and the play of lighting effects on different surfaces. […]The selective gaze paints a picture of urban fascination permeated by a dynamic choreography of static and moving sequences. Such effects of perception fused in pictorial montages are most obviously achieved by virtue of mirror reflections, split screens, and rotation […]. In some instances, the viewer cannot infer the material reality of the surfaces. […] They are reduced to pure surface and materiality. Yet Lloyd’s practice is not limited to the filmed image; the installation, with monitors, flat screens, and projectors elegantly and meticulously set out in the room, also acquires a strong presence. The visitor is inevitably confronted not only with the pictures, but also with their manifestation”.

CULPABLE EARTH
Steven Claydon, Firstsite

Culpable Earth is a monograph on the work of British artist Steven Claydon and was published to accompany the exhibition of the same name at firstsite, Colchester, UK (4 February – 7 May 2012). It features over 300 illustrations and previously unpublished texts about and by the artist, alongside an extended interview between Claydon and Martin Clark, Artistic Director, Tate St Ives.

The first major solo exhibition by Claydon in a UK public gallery was organised here by the acutely discerning Michelle Cotton, Senior Curator at firstsite. SecMoCo worked closely with her and the artist in the process of designing the accompanying publication, gaining a valuable insight into Claydon’s interests and preoccupations. The work draws on, engages with, and employs a huge historical resource of art, literature, design, politics and theory (for example, he is perhaps the only contemporary British artist investigating and drawing from the texts of the Pre-Socratic philosophers). From the outset Claydon’s intention was to adopt the layout and style of a particular 1960′s Italian architectural journal, (one that used the formal discipline of the then popular ‘Neue Grafik’ or ‘Swiss’ style of design), the task then was to ‘pour into’ that template documentation of his work to date, plus a generous selection from his wide-ranging research, and an illustrated and indexical chronology.

First edition published by firstsite March 2012 in an edition of 1,500 copies; edited by Michelle Cotton; texts: Martin Clark, Steven Claydon, Michelle Cotton and Patrizia Dander; 242 x 212mm; 144pp thread sewn; 260 colour and 45 b&w images; 2-colour softback cover, plus 1x metallic printing

Context from Michelle Cotton: ‘Over the last decade Steven Claydon’s sculpture, print, painting, film and performance have been worrying away at the taxonomies and values integral to the Western canon. His exhibitions with their hessian grounds, stacked pedestals, frames within frames, portrait busts and eccentric artifacts both emulate and debunk the nature of the museum’.

And from the firstsite website: ‘Claydon describes his work as being concerned with the ‘passage of materials’, namely, how materials journey from raw matter into cultural artefact. In doing so, he raises questions about the value of everyday objects. The artist sees objects as being ‘culpable’, in the sense that they reveal something about society at large. However small his starting point, a mass of atoms or a grouping of coloured pixels, Claydon combines materials and concepts in endlessly complex structures.

Claydon’s sculptures often present highly crafted objects in bespoke structures that visually reference museum displays. He brings together objects recalling historical artefacts – such as portrait busts, pots and vessels – cultural ephemera and geological samples, skilfully mixing different cultures and periods of history. Ancient technologies are combined with modern, electronic equipment and traditional craft skills are presented in digital video installations. Through these combinations, Claydon creates new, hybrid objects.

Merging reality with fiction, and appearing at once meaningful and useless, Claydon’s works oscillate between an idea of truth and fantasy, seeming to offer a fragmented image of a future civilisation’s past’.

BOMBYX MORI
Simon Periton, First Site

A monograph designed to accompany the solo exhibition of Simon Periton’s work in, and the landscaping of, the grounds of Firstsite, Colchester.

Such are the intricacies of the artist’s work- in which he often employs a stylish cutting, folding, doubling and general complexification of the visual image- that it seemed fitting that any printed representation of it should reflect these themes. After a thoroughly enjoyable process of detailed conversation and close work with the artist, we produced an object both full of historical context and also visually rich, including elegant documentation of the artworks situated in the gallery grounds. The resulting multi-layering design principle- of both images and actual paper folds/trimming- also called for a high level of binding and finishing skills from the printer.

First edition published, by Firstsite, Colchester, UK, 2012; edited by Asana Greenstreet; texts: Katherine Wood, with an interview between the artist and firstsite Associate Curator Jes Fernie; 235mm x 175mm; 24 pp; 35 colour and 9 b&w images; softback plus slipcase.

As detailed by the printer (Calverts of London): ‘The brochure has a gatefolded 8pp cover, printed in one pantone colour on 300gsm Arcoprint Extra White, with all the type and white-out elements cylinder embossed. The texts and images are on a lighter weight Arcoprint and 150gsm Hello Silk, collated as long 8pp spreads and then hand gatefolded to close, with brass wire stitches in the spine’.

Exhibition context: The artist researched the eighteenth-century design of firstsite’s garden to develop a new installation there taking the form of three lanterns and a lampost. There is a long-established mulberry tree on the grounds, and the worms of the silkmoths that appear in his artworks were essential to domestic silk production in nineteenth-century Colchester.