The copies arrived two weeks ago but Intimate Infinity/Intimität der Unendlichkeit still feels notional, as it has for so long. “Version of the book that never was” is an epigraph I found necessary – partly because this feels less like my next book than a prequel to my work of recent years: a completion of an arc not allowed to form a circle.
Though “allowed” is too active. The work of book-making is staggering: the number of elements weighed and gauged and honed to a bare one hundred pages, holding in its absences the hundreds of photos I set to one side. One writer compared Intimate Infinity to a train journey: a handful of framed views out of the thousands one sweeps past, unattending.
Now this book feels like a beginning. It’s itself, but also an invitation – to others and to myself – to let the object go on being porous, as many of my favourite works are, embracing accretions and interventions. I’m tipping in images and scraps of what could have been in some of the copies. (I’ve always loved the term “tipping in”.) And for those who want, the book can be a point zero, a bridge to new work of their own. Such collaborations begin in unknowing, and culminate somewhere breathtaking.
A Fair Exchange (2026) grew out of another collaboration begun with Silences Stille Schweigen this spring. I first reflected on archive versus library, preservation versus circulation, when doing my MFA. Contained here is a question about how worth is determined, or a pledge fulfilled.
The artist has made these objects.
The institution has authorised their display.
Visitors determine their value.
This isn’t a gift, but what’s asked for in return is for the viewer to decide.
There’s a delicious tension to not knowing what will be on the plinths when the exhibition closes. Will I be deflated if it ends as it began? Will people’s reasons for not participating change the work’s nature? What bevy of objects might emerge?
I do savour the endless wheel of work that’s material for the next thing, cycling spirals that disperse, then return to a centre. I’ll reunite with Nur and Thembe, two poets from my MFA, to share our new books at Savvy Contemporary on 21st October. There, and in a pair of workshops this month and next, I’ll be strewing offcuts from Intimate Infinity, A Fair Exchange, and a thousand other rough drafts to be intercut with participants’ memories and dreams. I’ve always found the artist book extraordinarily grounding, and I’m genuinely curious to observe what emerges.
That spirit of earthing through making has me excited for my first book fair at Künstlerhaus Bethanien. I’m often making things, then foiled by the weight of practicalities. (I’ll never be deft at PayPal and postal sessions.) So this will be an exhalation, a cache of works readied and shared under the name of Circle&Arc ~ Bogen&Kreis.
At my table, I’ll have copies of Twelve Centuries of Silence; a new broadside of “A City Fades”; copies of Intimate Infinity plain and with additions by hand; a 2027 engagement diary, because I’m always wrangling time.
I received a beautiful email from a Canadian poet last week that has stirred me to make an informal version of Maximum Summer – glad that this book I love has travelled, sad that its life has been brief. Though my copyshop pamphlet is nothing as perfect as Nion Editions’ cobalt, cloth-bound hardback avec cyanotype, it lets the text go on moving.
I’ll be glad to bring these and more to such light as I find in late autumn. “Helligkeit – und etwas in uns gibt nach”, Dilek writes in Intimate Infinity. Light’s still here as we watch darkness nearing. Donna writes: “‘Stay, thou art so fair,’ we say, to everything that blooms and cannot live forever.”
As I say, wrangling with time.