Cunning Chapters: Making and Curating Artists' Books in the Context of Material Aesthetic.

This is a collaborative project co-curated with Dr. Katharine Meynell, Reader in Fine Art at Middlesex University.

We have worked with artists and writers considering issues of conservation and material stability through making and critical reflection. I have produced two individual chapters that link to my ongoing concerns with writing practice using found languages, and reading processes in relation to book structure.

"Revision Piece" is a series of ten drawings of reworked imagery from science textbooks written for children in the nineteen-sixties, and having the quality of asemic writing. I researched polymer plate and letterpress technology and printed the plates onto Offenbach Bible paper.

Also letterpress printed, "Armour-piece" is a visual text derived from descriptions of early European armour. Metal staples link pages of the foldout structure and also appear in the margins at points where the language becomes contemporary (stealth-bomb, body-bag, friendly-fire) prompting the reader to find a text within the text.

Susan Johanknecht

Research Interests

Artists' books, Book Art, Contemporary poetics, Small press publishing

Profile

Studied English Literature at the University of Vermont, Burlington, USA (1973-77) and Fine Art and Printmaking at the Central School of Art (1981-86). Lectured extensively on Printmaking and Book Arts in the UK since 1985, including at Oxford Brookes University and Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, joined Camberwell College of Art in 1997.
Work in collections include the New York Library; V&A Museum, London; Tate Gallery Library, London; Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; University Library of Heidelberg; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum van het Boek, Netherlands; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington.

She has most recently co-curated - and exhibited in - 'Cunning Chapters: A Collaborative Artists' Book', on show at the British Library, London until January 2008.

Current Research

"My research focuses on the development and production of artists' books under the imprint of Gefn Press. The press has published thirty books to date and will have a retrospective exhibition at the University of Vermont, Burlington, USA in 2006/07. Projects from the last decade have explored relationships between digital sequences, photo-animations outputted onto CD-ROM or DVD and the physical book. Discussing this work in 'Literary Value / Cultural Power: Verbal Arts in the Twenty-first Century' (Manchester University Press), Lynette Hunter describes the pieces as 'synergetic texts'.
I am interested in the artists' book as a site for collaborative practice, and in 1997-2000 co-curated the artists' book millennium project 'Volumes (of vulnerability)' with Dr. Katharine Meynell of Middlesex University, which included the work of twenty artists and toured internationally. We are currently developing a new collaborative venture entitled 'Cunning Chapters' which will re-examine the category of artists' books in light of recent cultural and technological shifts, producing a series of chapters where issues of aesthetics and 'well-madeness' are exposed and analysed.

Another recent collaborative project was co-editing the book 'Here are my Instructions' (2004) with Dr. Redell Olsen of Royal Holloway, University of London in response to the 'writing instructions / reading walls' series of installations we curated at the Poetry Society, London in 2003. I am continuing to consider physicality and poetics through my investigation of letterpress printing and writing practice (recent poems are published in HOW(2), internet journal of Contemporary and Innovative Writing by Women hosted by Bucknell University, and PORES, avant-gardist journal of poetic research hosted by Birkbeck College).
The latest Gefn Press publication 'Subsequent Drainage on Folding Rocks' incorporates a hypertext CD into a printed booklet looking at landscape as a site of natural and industrially initiated change."