Page by Page - A limited edition Artist's Book
A collaboration: Artists book designed and hand-bound by Lucy Stuart Clark. All drawings by Diana Page.
Drawing is fundamental to me, a way of being in the world. Recently, I have been exploring different possibilities for presenting the continuous work I do as an Artist in my drawing books, including digital presentation. Drawing books act as a record of an ongoing process of seeing and composition. In the books, chronology is deliberately disrupted. Chance juxtapositions of ideas and images in their pages set in motion new inquiries. Drawing is fundamental to me, a way of being in the world. Nearly a decade ago, Artist, Lucy Stuart Clark’s hand bound notebooks became my sketchbooks of choice. Since then I have filled countless of these in all shapes and sizes. Drawing from my library of sketchbooks, Lucy Stuart-Clark and I now launch a hand-bound limited- edition sketchbook: an edition of 21, based on a sketchbook kept by myself during ten days in a government quarantine facility. Besides the views from my balcony, it also references a recent time spent in the South African Fynbos, and the saris given to me on my departure from South Africa. Each book is an artwork in itself. No two books are identically bound, and each book features a different original drawing on its cover.
-Diana Page
Bookbinding, as a medium that has the potential to express a story in its physicality and structure, has always been an important part of my creative process as an artist, illustrator and printmaker. Last April when Diana Page visited South Africa, we had the idea to turn one of her sketchbooks into a limited edition handbound book. Having chosen the Quarantine sketchbook, the book developed as Diana sent me scans from other sketchbooks of South Africa and Istanbul, to choose at my own discretion. Using these vast vistas as vertical and horizontal gatefolds dotted throughout her quarantine sketches, drawings began to physically breach the boundaries of her book. I loved how they increase the sense of entrapment in her quarantine sketches and simultaneously express how limitless her imagination and memory was despite her forced confinement. This book is at its heart the very expression of a borderless life – sketchbooks made in Cape Town, filled in Turkey and South Africa, reimagined into a new limited edition artist’s book in Cape Town, handbound in Cape Town using the sari (that had travelled from India to South Africa to Istanbul) to cover the book.
-Lucy Stuart-Clark
(Photographs of Artist’s Proof courtesy of ©️ Georgina Behrens)
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