Artist Book: Queer Paper Gardens, 2013
SLIPCASE EDITION WITH SILKCSREEN PRINT
Five softcover volumes, in a customised, numbered and signed grey board slipcase, with a numbered and signed silkscreen, book dimensions when closed: 21 cm x 29.7 cm, offset printed in munken pure paper 150 gr., edition of 100
BAND-WRAPPED EDITION
Five softcover volumes, wrapped in a customised band, total 158 pages , book dimensions when closed: 21 cm x 29.7 cm, offset printed in munken pure 150 gr., edition of 100, unsigned
Estranhos Jardins de Papel / Queer Paper Gardens approaches the history of collage through a combination of artistic research with historic and visual enquiry. Departing from an installation made up of a collage-salon, two artists’ books, two double-screen video-essays and two large-scale charcoal drawings, the project integrates a variety of literary and visual narratives, that interweave fiction with historical archives.
The project focuses on several works of collage, created across three centuries, which range from Flora Delanica (1772-1782), Mary Delany’s botanical collage work, considered a pioneering instance of collage on paper, to the photographic collages of the Victorian era and, finally, to the Modernist collage-novels that constitute the exhibition’s fulcrum: Max Ernst’s Une Semaine de Bonté (1934), and Valentine Penrose’s Dons des Féminines (1951).
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Revisiting all these works brings out a number of visual and textual narratives that explore the concept of journey: a journey through the history of collage and a delocalisation in time – something quite appropriate to the inherent features of the collage technique; and a journey through the exotic as a space for freedom, allowing for playful experimentation in opposition to the repressive and reclusive environment of bourgeois home life.
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The crossing and mixing of the aforementioned sources, together with the various stories they tell, generate a means to approach several contemporary sexuality-related issues, namely those concerning the contructions of gender.