Scattered Leaves
The trestle tables support myriad sheets of paper scattered from one end to the other. Old, venerable books—The Book of Common Prayer, The Book of Hours, the work of Hildegard of Bingen, Blake’s illuminated manuscripts—mix in with and on the same plane as pages written and designed by the participants. Some photos scattered through A Book of Ours reveal sites of great activity, at once purposive, joyous, and randomly playful (“Mind drifting lazily. / All over the place”). Then in other photos an artist has held up their page to be seen in the concentrated joy of its making: a single page has been momentarily lifted out of the sea of scatterings for view.
A Life, a Presence like the Air,
Scattering thy gladness without care”
(William Wordsworth, “To the Cuckoo”)
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind
(Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind”)
ABOVE:
Workshop, A BOOK OF OURS.
Photographs by Lois Blackburn
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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