The ground zero of my work undertaken in pursuit of my research is my existing body of work and knowledge.

My research, broadly speaking, involves artists’ books and my work has centred on books for almost ten years. Over that time I have lived with the many elements of usage and personal enquiry one develops as one uses a particular medium or form. My research is developing from a desire to become more conscious of what had up till then been concerns roughly experienced as problems which were overcome in particular projects or as opportunities to exploit the form that would give me cause for reflection. In short, I want to better understand the unique properties of Artists’ Books.

This description, then, of my “ground zero”, encompasses a range of
practical skills in book production, desktop publishing, image
manipulation, photography and narrative skills that were my tools as I
continued to produce a series of artists’ books. As I have said, I had
had a growing desire to examine more fully the nature of the form I had
found myself using, and a desire to make available, somehow, the
excitement I felt about what I suspected were the unusual if not unique
qualities of artists’ books.

With these goals in mind I enrolled as a PhD/MPhil candidate, and
since that point I have been trying various ways to express these goals
through my evolution of a research project that could address feasible
points of research in artists’ books and simultaneously fit in with the
areas of interest native to me and to my work.

Essentially, what my work undertaken to date so far has consisted of
has been a series of runs at developing a proposal for a research
project. This has been augmented over time by further awareness of the
existing writing on the topic of Artists’ Books. This has led to my
reading and making notes on several of these and the construction of a
reading list that will eventually see me having read the important
texts of this specialised canon.  Of course, I am continuing to develop
this reading list alongside a growing awareness of likely sources of
information, with a concomitantly expanding potential bibliography,
and, admittedly, a growing sense of urgency that I should manage
somehow to encompass the existing literature in my field. Parallel to
this, I have also tried to apply various theoretical planks to the
notional research ideas that are evolving from the notes and queries
arising from my readings.

Alongside my acquisition of new sources and familiarisation with my
“local canon” as it were, I’ve also been attending a series of meetings
where fellow artists are presenting their work.  One of the outcomes of
this is that it has become necessary to refine and codify some of my
thoughts regarding the nature of my artwork and the strategies I use to
make it.  This has suggested various categories or keywords or
strategies (they are, in this sense, interchangeable). For example, If
I use concepts such as space, the dichotomy of interior and exterior,
the idea of a narrative space, then these are the hooks on which I hang
my conversation, my interaction, and, despite the mistakes, false dawns
and rhetorical dead-ends I may be producing,  I am gaining a vocabulary
by which to lay down a set of interests and strategies within my work.
That such a vocabulary is influenced by my reading, and that my
critical reflection on both my reading and my work steer together by a
common piloting of enquiry, is no surprise.

The aims of my research will depend on what my research project is, finally.

My most recent (undiscussed) simplification of the process has led
to the question “Are artists’ books enabling to the artists who make
them?” My own case is that I think that they are.

However, I am choosing this question as a Trojan horse for several
other concerns: from artistic intention to concerns of narrative and
presence.  I hope that such a question would pull out strands of
discussion about what Artists’ Books do for the artist who makes them.
Such a question is relatively unexplored, with many sources being more
to do with the positioning of the Artists’ Book as an artform in its
various cultural milieux. I want instead, to know whether Artists’
Books can do anything special for the artists who use them. My hope is
that I would be able to draw some conclusions about the possibilities
inherent in the artists book as a vehicle for accomplishing feats of
narrative, intention and space that are (arguably) uniquely or
not-so-uniquely to do with artists’ books. By presenting research that
outlines ways in which book forms are used by artists to produce
particular effects, I would be outlining some of the Artists’ Book’s
areas of usefulness, turning to a discussion of Artists’ Books that
comes from the artists making them and their estimations of how
successful their efforts have been. This is the other side of the
historical panorama on which Artists’ Books appear, and I would like to
make some document of what my contemporaries are using the form for,
and why (and whether) they think it works for them. I don’t want to
deny myself the pleasure of some abstruse processing of my thoughts on
the medium through the lens of various theoretical regimens, and, in
truth, I haven’t made up my mind about which particular signposts or
critical tools will best serve my purposes. Accordingly my reading
continues on a fairly wide basis in these matters. Given that I want to
give myself as much studio time as possible, I am perhaps better
advised to steer clear of anything too exotic.
My researches so far,
have, as outlined above, been at the stage of trying to draw a focus on
specific areas of enquiry, and on trying to draw up a vocabulary of
personal and theoretical practice that will answer for the evolving
notions of what it is that I’m doing.

Accordingly, I’ve been reading about Artists’ Books and trying to
apply or find suitable lines of theory to run my suppositions through.
Not always successfully. Books by well-known commentators such as
Johanna Drucker, Stephen Bury, Cornelia Lauf and Clive Phillpot and
Cathy Courtney have chimed against readings in Bachelar, Derrida,
Heidegger, John R. Searle and others. As I’ve made notes on my
readings, I’ve also been constructing applications of theory to the
evolving notion of book art that’s still, however occluded it sometimes
seems, at the core of my research. What this means in practice is that
my notes are littered with rhetorical questions and parallels of
imagery, metaphor and form that intrigue me. Of late, I’ve been looking
more at books by other artists (so far I’ve visited Edinburgh City Art
Library’s collection, and U.W.E’s collection) and other artworks to
which I have some sort of relationship, trying to write honestly about
what it is in them I feel I have some relationship to. Accordingly,
this is a widely-spread net, which stretches from Isaac Julien to
Joseph Cornell, to Helen Douglas and Nic Roeg, from J.S. Bach to Peter
Greenaway. The point of this is to expose a vocabulary which I commonly
use to describe my relationship to these artworks, in a process akin to
that which surfaces when talking and thinking about my own. As I write
just now, I’m still going over many of the other artists on this
long-ish list, making notes preparatory to a review of what my major
tropes seem to have been. Not to be too disingenuous about my awareness
of these surfacing concepts, I have already identified several areas in
my own practice that are consistently of interest to me. For example,
the notion of “temporary structure” and the attendant qualities of
games are something I see enacted in my work and in the work of others.
Reconstruction, refiguring, interpretation is also a method I’ve
frequently picked up. Notions to do with the immersion of books and a
comparison to the immersion in other media- VR and panoramic
techniques- and what these have to do with the senses and intention of
artist and reader are still-forming areas that I want my work and
writing to explore in the future.

My consciousness of and reflections on these notions and their
evolving, shifting place in my work and thought is in itself a very
affecting factor in how my work now proceeds. It will be remembered
that it was my explicit wish that I should form a more conscious set of
ideas, within the nimbus of which my practice would proceed. Indeed, I
find myself in my current studio project, Whistling Copse, attending as
much to studio journals and the mapping of potential context as I am to
the making of images. (Perhaps, for the moment, more so. I am still
coming to terms with returning to an academic environment.) In
practical terms however, I’m being drawn towards a more radical
experimentation with the book form, and a (fairly conservative)
experimentation with narrative. I’m interested in challenging my
existing, comfortable relations with “temporary structure”
“reconstruction” and “immersion” and have been drawing up notes for
bookworks which are not familiar book forms at all, and a matrix of
research material on my subject (woodlands, poaching, murder,
ballistics, evidence) that I can present as several ‘vectors” of
narrative in a series of books.
I still have a great deal to do. As
I write I feel that I am further away from developing a decision about
the exact nature of my research than ever (though I’m told that I’m
doing okay in this respect). What seems to have been happening over the
last few months has been about drawing out reflective practice and
coining a vocabulary from the material gained. This vocabulary has gone
on to shape thought and practice, whilst I simultaneously garner
together resources, both material and conceptual, that are currently
the subject of my ongoing meditations and slow accretion of a workable
problem, critical toolkit and methodology. These two more-or-less
separate activities: of reflection and review, and, on the other hand a
review of my field and the critical resources used to examine it, have
been coming together for some time. At the moment I’m not sure that
they- “my work” and “my field” will quite match up.

However, for the present, I can see that a further review of what
has gone before is imminent, that an expression of my reflections and
research to date is going to be useful, and that this should form the
basis for a new formulation of my PhD proposal. I intend to continue
with the exercises and reading I’m currently using and try to train
them towards the goal of summing up my notions what my problem is and
how I intend to solve it.

I have already characterised some rough ideas about how I am
interested in how artists’ books enable artists, and that I am
therefore interested in how artists work with them. This will certainly
be addressed by some closely recorded work of my own, and by as much
contact with other contemporary book artists as possible. I would love,
for example, to write up the whole of a book’s production from first
formal ideas to production. Interviewing and close contact would
therefore be required. These practicalities await the formal
construction of a research question before I commit more time and
thought to them, however, and so my activities now are centred more on
reading and reflecting on artists’ books and my practical and critical
relationship to them.