Frontispiece
In a large rectangular insert reaching to a left-hand margin the months parade down the page in four groups of three for a season, each one of which appears in a color: yellow-green, blue, yellow, and pinkish-red. Parallel to the list of months a vertical, loosely sequential grouping of letter-like forms float from top to bottom . . . or is it bottom to top? An inviting stone house, with snow-covered pointed roof and tall brick chimney, flanked on one side by two evergreen (Christmas?) trees and a sky of moon and stars. Perhaps Christmas, coming at the end of the year and just “below” December marks a utopian moment at once in time and yet among the constellations: the otherness of Grimm’s fairy-tales. Yet this scene also connotes beginnings, the place from which one departs, flanked on the right by the leafy origins of a vine travelling up the butterflies and beetles: spring is in the ascendency. Vines become a gnarly tree trunk (with owl peering out of a hollow) branching out just above the top of the text insert and opening to a rising sun over green hills. Almost flush with the horizon is an ocean liner. Overall, the text and the imagery partake of similar color tones: names and sequence of months evoke not clock time but natural and cosmic design, which the tiny couple must see as they stare out at the sunrise. The page is bewilderingly rich. Are we to read down the page with the text or up the page with the imagery? Is the house the goal of the homeless or the point of departure on the journey upwards and outwards, a waking up? Insects seem properly located amidst vines and the tree, but the human imagination travels in hope from state to state. I suggest that the Frontispiece frames the quotidian particulate life in the calendar that follows, conferring value at every point.
HEAR: songs, recitations and chants
A BOOK OF OURS was exhibited at Bury Art Museum May-July 2021, then Manchester Cathedral Oct 2021-March 2022, after which it went permanently into the collection at John Rylands Library, where it can now be viewed. It is the last project by arthur+martha CIC.
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