Artist’s book in slipcase, setting the poem dol dhachaigh by Aonghas MacNeacail with his own translation into English going home, on a double-sided concertina book, each side of nine double pages (15cm x 15cm), plus cover, each page 7.5cm high x 15cm wide, and in total 135cm long; painted with watercolour and acrylics, and lettered with a dropped-feather quill; in a slipcase made from the same handmade cotton-rag paper 17cm w x 8cm h x 2cm d. The book is designed in landscape orientation, with its spine along the long (valley) side, and the pages read from front to back like a range of hills behind each other, receding as ‘a great cloak spreading behind’. Signed, numbered and dated, 1 in a limited edition of 3 variants.
The form of this book was suggested by the words of the poem, in which Aonghas MacNeacail has so vividly evoked an image that signals the end of summer to us: geese and swallows ‘journeying / Summer journeying’, drawing Autumn behind them like a great cloak – or is it Summer who is journeying, drawing Autumn behind him? Such a powerful image, the skein of birds drawn out on their annual migration, the seasons following at their call.
I wanted to express this in the simplest possible way without direct illustration. I’d just made another, smaller artist’s book setting lines from Kenneth White’s Late August on the Coast, with the migrating geese combining with the letters of the words to make the arrow formation of their flight. There, I’d used rain and snow-melt to mix with the watercolours to draw the material presence of the weather into the physical form of the book. And I’d drawn the letters and the birds with the same quill pen made from a dropped feather I picked up on the Heath.
But for going home, I wanted to work with the text in a less directly illustrative way. To begin, I considered the tensions and connections between the words in the original Gaelic and in the poet’s own translation as being related to the duality of the summer/autumn trope and the distance of the migration from one shore to another, from one season to another, with the journeying being in time as well as place.
I aimed to express these interconnected dualities with a double-sided book, each side the mirror of the other, so that the Gaelic words and the English words would be manifested in the same way, and with each side again divided into two, with foreground and distance. I made the book from four long sheets of handmade cotton-rag paper, hinged by overlapping, and constructed back to back. The first two sheets I painted with the summer sky, the second two I painted for the great cloak of autumn, and then made each side with one of each, hinged by overlapping their central three pages, and constructed with acid-free adhesive.
Then, with the wild goose-feather quill I’d picked up on the Heath, I lettered the poem, Gaelic on one side, English on the other, each short line on one page, so that the reader opens the pages with the first page in the foreground plane, and the great cloak of autumn recedes into the distance; not easy to show in typography on the page, but quite simple working within the three dimensions of the book’s volume.
To revisit the other books in this Journeying quartet, please follow the links below:
Daughters of Earth 