From my collection - 'Cacophony' by Ed Hutchins

 

I was excited to receive a copy of this new sculptural book from Ed Hutchins recently, a new release in 2021 from Editions, his small press which publishes his artists book multiples.  

Cacophony is a first edition of 200 copies.  It is quite large, about the size of an A4 page.

  

It went on an unusual journey from New York via Tokyo on it's way to Australia.  Due to the pandemic there are not so many flights in and out of Australia but I guess there were lots of planes flying in and out of Tokyo during the Olympic Games!  It went off the tracking radar but fortunately it did arrive at my home eventually in perfect condition.

Creating sculptural books whose structure and form relate to the theme or content of the book is a characteristic of Ed Hutchins' work and something I've always been interested in.  Ed's work definitely influenced me to consider structure as an essential element I could use to visually complement the content and create added meaning in artists books.  

Cacophony has a complicated structure made up of two intersecting concertinas that fold down flat.  The concertinas have cut-outs and irregular cut edges, with words seemingly popping up at you from every direction.  

 The book is laser printed from Ed's artwork and as the different panels intersect with each other, it must have been a very exacting procedure to have part of the artwork at the intersection on one panel and the matching part on another panel.  Absolute precision would have been required. 

 The T D and P seen below are examples of letters printed on two separate sheets of card and meeting precisely.

The concertinas contain 127 words that express sounds and exclamations.  Their intersecting nature  allows all the words to mix and mingle inside and out and some of them pop up or out at you visually creating the idea of a cacophony.  

A card accompanying the book contains a list of the words included as the text. 

  

WOW was my first impression and a cut-out freestanding Wow has been inserted into slots in one of the cut-out circular areas on the front side of the book and takes the word count to 128! 

Ed has created a colourful, joyful masterwork that makes you smile.   

 

A video posted by Ed Hutchins on You tube displays the book moving in the round here.

You can also find a number of other teaching videos on You tube where Ed demonstrates how he worked on different aspects of this masterpiece of construction. 

Ed Hutchins

I received some correspondence from Ed Hutchins in Salem NY recently - his characteristic envelopes covered with stickers and interesting US stamps always look so joyful and are a delight to receive.

One of the things in the envelope was his business card for his collection.  Ed always manages to make everything seem like fun.

I was thrilled to see that a book of mine in his collection, Lost in a Million Dead End Streets was featured in the centrefold.   The title is a phrase from David Bowie's song Changes.  These words always fascinated me and conjured up many images.

Ed Hutchins' work was very influential on me and my further work after I first saw his book World Peace, dated 1991 and which I saw in publications in the early 1990's.  

 It was presented as a circular book made up of four quarter circle books.

Image from Book Dynamics by Ed Hutchins

 I experimented with sculptural books and cube shaped books, but I enthusiastically embraced the idea of quarter circle books with folded pages based on Ed's structure.

My first attempt was a little book in 1995 called How the Sun was made.

From then on, the folded circular page became much used in my work and was a wonderful structure for experimentation.

I created the structure of Lost in a Million Dead End Streets by first making a multipage quarter circle book.   I stood the quarter circle book up on its point with the first and last pages lying down flat and the pages fanned to form the middle spine of my new book.  I made a number of additional circular pages folded into the same quarter circle structure and these pages were then inserted into the folds of the opened standing book with an equal number of pages inserted on each side of the central structure.  After attaching these to the initial quarter circle book, I had created the structure of a semi circle book which also displays as a dome.

My artist's statement for this book was 

'The structure and format reflect being 'lost' and going round in circles, never reaching the end destination. The text reveals that the goal of the 'journey' is not to arrive, but to always be 'lost', searching and learning and open to new experiences.

I made 6 copies of Lost in a Million Dead End Streets between 2008-2010.  All are in collections - Ed Hutchins, Bank Street Arts, Sheffield UK, Linea d'arte Officina Creativa, Naples Italy (who re-exhibited their copy at a Biennale del Libro d'Artista in 2017) and three in private collections.

Thank you, Ed Hutchins, for your friendship, inspiration, encouragement and creativity.