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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VENUS
July 2020 
Studio Edition of 5 copies only.
11.5cm x 30cm
13 pages, 3 illustrations.
Hard covers using brown paper wrapping.
Graphite rubbings of handcut stencils and text plates create the body text and illustrations of this book. The poem takes its origins from stories surrounding Jean Genet's 'Our Lady Of The Flowers' and is a paean to the pencil.
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Siddarta Darth Gautama
A rather fine artefact. Especially pleased with the black and gold combo.
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Burning Down The Oasis
The Vulture Is A Patient Bird
October 2017
A6, 8 pages, unique drawing by Los Dave.
Edition of 50. Numbered and signed by the artists.
The Vulture Is A Patient Bird
October 2017
A6, 8 pages, unique drawing by Los Dave.
Edition of 50. Numbered and signed by the artists.
The piece is a sharp critique of the state of mental health services in 2017. Underfunded and under siege from the press and bureaucracy, mental health services are paralysed.
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Phaedra//Inflatable Virgin Mary, 2000
5cm x 5cm, 8 Pages
Two versions have been recorded by different artists as sound pieces and uploaded to soundcloud.com/losdave HERE and HERE
Re-imagined in 2017 as a sculpture. Comprising of two of my recycled, used disposable barbecue grill birds and the original printer ribbon tapes, made for my solo show at Coastguard studio in May 2017. The sculpture consisted of 2 crows picking at the typewriter ribbons used to print the books.
Re-imagined in 2017 as a sculpture. Comprising of two of my recycled, used disposable barbecue grill birds and the original printer ribbon tapes, made for my solo show at Coastguard studio in May 2017. The sculpture consisted of 2 crows picking at the typewriter ribbons used to print the books.
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#0003 - "Khayyam"
Letterpress soft covers with single, folded screenprint/letterpress page illustrating a verse from the 11th century Persian poet and polymath Omar Khayyam.
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#0002 - "Pronounced Foot"
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Book a day project 2017,
#0001 - "Foot"
7.5cm x16.5cm Single fold out page. Letterpress printed text on aluminium foil with a monoprint on paper. Painted board covers. Signed and dated. Unique one off artbook.
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Edition of 20. Signed, dated, numbered.
- linocut,
- screen print,
- hand rendered text,
- painting,
- offset letterpress,
- graphite rubbing,
- stencil,
- stamped text,
- hand finished stickers and more.
All hand stitched into covers made from a unique and intriguing material.
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STONE DEAD FOREVER I and II (2010 and 2011)
Available to buy now, two books of photographs of the poetic stone writing project from Los Dave.
More details and photographs of the project - HERE - Stone Dead Forever is comments, quips, quotes, words, text, lyrics, poems, jokes, statements or simply observations written on the pebbles of Southsea beach.
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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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'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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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. Edition of 45, leporello, printed on a 1990's Sanyo 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'. 'zine 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 Southsea beach. Read all about it 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. Printed and published in collaboration with senior lecturer Maureen O'Neill at University of Portsmouth during my time on the degree course there.
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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 wander 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 :)
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