Here are four artist’s books themed around journeying, from my Singing the Year series. I think of these artist’s books as contemporary illuminated manuscripts, and perhaps they can serve some of the functions of medieval ones, as objects of contemplation that connect us with spiritual and emotional truths beyond or behind the everyday, opening up a text to a slower reading and connecting our senses with the words.
The experience of handling the book as you read, turning its pages, feeling the handmade paper, breathing the scent of the materials, connects the book’s physical nature with the words of the poem, materialises the words, and the visual engagement of reading words that form part of an image, especially a continuous image extended through the book, allows the sound and meaning(s) of the words to flow through the reading, alerting and activating all the senses in response.
The text becomes illuminated, rather than illustrated, seen in a different light.
I’ve been working in my Singing the Year series for about fifteen years now, adding poems as I come across them, and exploring different forms. These contemporary illuminated manuscripts are also Books of Hours, with some focus on the cycle of the seasons, the passage of time, or more loosely, as seen here in Trackside, an examination of the human place journeying in the landscape of time.
It’s a joy to find a new poem like Trackside to set, but I’m also excited to discover poems from other times, other places, like the poem in the following book, In beauty, translated from a Navajo original, and other kinds of journeying in time and place, by the refugees on the long journey of hope in Walking, or other beings like the swallows in going home.
Daughters of Earth 