Description:

‘Walls to Live Beside, Rooms to Own’

21 x 27 cm
three colour options, internal pages are identical
buckram cloth softcover, stitched on
160 pages
ISBN 978-0-86463-3385

This publication accompanies ‘Walls to Live Beside, Rooms to Own’: The 2022 Chartwell Show, at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki. The exhibition is a response to our relationship to life at home – one that has been significantly impacted for many, if not all, of us during the global pandemic. Curated by Natasha Conland, Senior Curator, Global Contemporary Art, ‘Walls to Live Beside, Rooms to Own’ focuses on how artists have viewed the home, giving greater context to the relationship between art and home-life.

The interior of the book is designed in an oddly bureaucratic manner, dully presenting the accession number and all the official catalogue data of the artworks, in deadpan fashion captioning every single entry, including the essays and foreword, but straight across the centre of the publication, effectively cutting the book in half and producing all kinds of challenges for the layout– a limitation and an obstacle that we set in order to challenge ourselves and to play with the idiosyncrasy and humanity of collections and archives. The hand-written title on library buckram brings warmth and humanity to the bureaucracy.

The book makes an additional statement with its one-of-a-kind hand-finished softcover, which was screen printed on Library Buckram cloth in 3 colours specifically chosen to compliment the exhibition and then section sewn. It is the most flexible but at the same time durable book we have ever designed, partly a book, partly a strange utilitarian / library cum archive-like object.

The hand written title was used not only on the cover of the publication but also as part of the exhibition identity further juxtaposing personalised domesticity and cold utilitarianism of a state run and funded institution.