The Home

It's not a Home - a Home is a house with a future.

I wrote this piece maybe twenty years ago and for me, it still stands as one of the finest things I've written. After seeing a documentary about the lives of a group of elderly folk confined to a home, and knowing a few people who had spent time working in that environment, I taped an interview with my Nan - a hugely important figure in my life. This was in the mid '90's, a long time before the scandals in the press about care homes, amid deep concerns about institutionalisation, Government and care-worker's attitudes to the elderly, and a long time before any of these things were actually to affect my own family directly. 

First published in an edition of 'SILT', it's never really found a space of its own, but I've always felt it deserves it. Maybe someday soon... It's about many, many things, but rather than trying to explain it, I would like you to read it. That's what it was written for - you'll make your own connections, and hopefully find your own resonances.  - D.

A Personal Archaeology of Artists Books - A Retrospective

A Personal Archaeology of Artists Books - A Retrospective

In my formative years at art college I was lucky enough to meet Brian Walsh. This is the teacher who said to me at my interview for the Access course, "We'll put you on the part time course as you're the sort of person who uses the time away from college, in between sessions, to reflect and think about your work, as much as your time here."  This was a surprising statement, I felt as if no one had ever actually looked at me long enough to recognise more than my apparent presence. I was taken aback and disappointed to begin with, but quickly recognised what he had seen, and deeply appreciated the acuteness of his perception - an appreciation that has stayed with me since, and an identification that has since proved to be a fundamental aspect of my character. I am a reflective analytical thinker. I need my time staring blankly out of the window, sometimes more than I need food and sleep.

St. Albans College of Art stood opposite the deserted crumbling shell of the old Herts Advertiser press. When the press had shut down, some of the college art staff had raided the place for whatever they could carry out, and so in a corner of the basement car park of the college, locked in a caged area by the heating boiler were cases and cases of hot-metal moveable type, chases, composing sticks, quoins and leading. I asked Brian about it one day - and thus opened Aladdin's Cave. During a fifteen minute tea break he offered to show me. We went down and in a cold damp basement car park I was given the very briefest demonstration of how to set a line of type... I had taken the red pill - the world shifted inside out, swung round 180 degrees, bounced and rippled a couple of times, popped and made a *Wob wob* sound.

That *Wob wob* Sound - The sound of the Universe turning itself inside out.

And that was it for the next decade, I made artists books. Self penned, illustrated, printed, bound, self published, one off's and limited editions. I've shown and sold work at the Tate Britain, the ICA, the Barbican, the Arnolfini, at shows in Europe, Australia, the Middle East and the US.

Then for a decade and a half life interrupted things and I went off in different directions. Finding a quick summary set recently on Fluidr has prompted me to dip back into the archive and have a fresh look at some of this stuff. So I spent a day rooting around and digging back into the archive of things I've made and things I've collected. Most of the books/artefacts I have made are now freshly photographed and catalogued for the first time in ten years - it surprised me to discover that I've written and published over 30 books and artefacts - and so it is my pleasure to show you some of them here.

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'Apertures', 1997 - Boxed print folio of 33 monoprints exploring textures and forms of obstructions, openings and apertures between spaces.

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'Ardentia Verba - Words That Burn', 1997. Edition of 10. Based on an imagined multi-media performance of Derek Jarman's 'Blue'.

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'Nick Mackman's Beastly Exhibition', 2000. The Red Gallery, Southsea. Edition of 20. Printed letterpress on heavy weight Bockingford paper. Foreword by Chris Packham.

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'Camarata' artefact, 2003. Limited edition of 14. Part used, disposable, single use 35mm cameras repackaged in bespoke printed wrappers and shrink wrapping plastic film.

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'Caution - Abrasive', 1994. Edition of 12. Printed using a 'free' trial version of a CAD software with extremely limited functionality. Early exploration of the theme of 'hacking' and the means of production. Binding is nails taken from a Yoko Ono installation.

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'Dummy' editioned artefact, 1999. Edition of 12. Infant's dummy/comforter cast in copper/bronze, presented in a handmade miniature 'crate' filled with wood-wool.

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'Exit Stencilist', 2007. Produced in two distinct versions. Left (and at the top of the blog post) is the 'Stencilled Cover' version, an edition of 20, digitally printed but each copy bound in a unique, hand sprayed, stencilled cover by m-0ne and Los Dave.

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'IF - Imperative Future', 2002. Editioned printed artefact produced for the UWE/CFPR project 'The History Book That Never Was'.

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'Kitab/Katib', 2008. Hand printed and illustrated broadside to commemorate the bombing of the book market in Baghdad in 2007.  **See previous blogpost.

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'Last Night It Did Not Seem As If Today It Would Be Raining', 1996. Edition of 30, multiple printing methods including letterpress, offset, lino and screen print. 

Designed to illustrate the choices made in the transmission of Std's and HIV.

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'Mapping The Oneiric House', Unique book, 1997.
Based on Gaston Bachelard's 'Poetics Of Space'. Blind embossed etched plate illustrations and hand set letterpress type. Hand carved, sculpted plaster cover.

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'Húum.mÁ~n' - An Ode to Bob Cobbing', 2002. Open edition of photocopied images of digital distortions based on Bob Cobbings' initials. Produced to mark his death in 2002.

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'Phaedra', 2000. Open edition leporello, printed on an electric word processor with digitally printed covers. The text is a 'stream-of-consciousness' performance piece designed to be read aloud, based around visions of consumerism and religious iconography.

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'Ritual and Circumstance', 2002. Edition of 75. Printed, folded sheet of heavy watercolour paper into which has been smashed a glass ball. Celebrates the hammer as a printing tool...

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'Sea Of Clouds', 1998. Edition of 50. Leporello, printed letterpress with 'dry' printed, etched illustrations. The text is taken from the 1965 HMSO publication "Instructions For The Preparation Of Weather Maps".

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'SILT'. A 'zine that I published from 1998 to 2012. Essentially a vehicle for various modes of writing and illustration. An eclectic kaleidoscopic vision, by turns surrealistic, dark, poetical, comic and tragic. Character filled and opinionated. Often all at once. Should have done better than it did, but no one actually gave a shit. Still one of the publications that I'm most proud of.

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'Stone Dead Forever', 2008. Open edition, two volumes published through blurb.com in both hard and paperback. A photographic record of a project I started in 2008, writing on stones on the local beach. There is an earlier blogpost Here. 

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'The Dixon-Hurlingham Mysteries', 1999. Published to commemorate a memorable Christmas event, in which 'a protagonist' [anon], threw a Christmas tree - still in its pot - through the roof of a neighbouring building from five floors up...

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'The Interactive Book', 1997. Edition of 20, letterpress, loose 14 page folio with hand calligraphied, folded covers. A collection of quotes about books, printed in typefaces contemporary with their origination. 

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'Title <> Author', 2000. Originally produced as something to do while whiling away the weekend at the Y2k Bristol Artists Book Exhibition (BABE), at the Arnolfini in Bristol. The edition was compiled from off cuts of Fabriano paper and pre-printed stickers that I had taken with me. It was later re-produced in a Moleskine edition.

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'Typecast', 1998. A group publication, self funded and published by myself and a select group of recently graduated illustration students for our first independent showing at the Artists Book Fair at the Barbican Centre, London in 1998. Beautifully designed and printed by Mike Cooter at the uni print dept. and out of date before it even hit the stands... typical.

*F.t.a.g.h. - contact me if you want one!

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'Typonegative', 1998. Edition of 30. Incorporating handmade and printed elements with imagery cut from adverts in glossy magazines. Hand stitched, hand printed covers.

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'The Universal Book Of Tongues', 1997. Unique book. Hand made, letter-pressed covers, mono-printed tracing paper images dry mounted onto Fabriano paper and perfect bound. A visual exploration of calligraphic mark-making in the context of an essay on linguistics and the origins of speech by Noam Chomsky.

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'Untitled', 1999. Boxed folio of 33 hand-finished calligraphic monoprints. Finished with graphic additions in colour gouache individual to each print.

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'Urban Wildlife', 2004. Edition of 25. Handmade 'Khadi' paper covers featuring stencil and authentic pigeon 'shit'. Folded, stencilled plastic lining interwoven with pages from London A-Z, bound with crimped fluorescent fishing line. Inside each book is a used rail ticket 'colophon', a typewritten 'treatise' on Urban Wildlife, an invitation to a 'Poisoning Pigeons in the Park'** event and a couple of origami pigeons also made from London A-Z pages. 

(**Bring your own cyanide laced raisins...)

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'Veneer', 2004. Unique book work. 7 digitally printed 'page scrolls' encased in sand and clear resin inside three unique, handmade, engraved, glazed ceramic cases.

(**Unfortunately, two were damaged in transit on their way back from a show. Shit happens.)

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'Write Protected', 1997. Unique bookwork. 8 floppy disks stitched into a thin plywood binding.

The content of the book is entirely digital and stored on the disks which can't be accessed because the stitching goes right through them. I no longer have a record of the content.

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There are at least two more books that I can think of that are no longer represented here because I sold them and the photo archives are deep, deep, dark places for a man to wandering alone in. Maybe one day when I am otherwise incapacitated... until then, hold your breath.

The vast majority of these editions still have a few copies and re-runs left. If you're interested in any, drop me an email.

If you've made it this far and haven't expired from boredom or despair, thank you with all my heart for your commitment and stamina. 

Peace and love, Los Dave

**Poisoning Pigeons In The Park' is not and never was an actual event. It's a comedy song from the 1950's by Tom Lehrer!! - Catch it here :)