Drawing on shapes that echo across centuries – the vase or amphora, and in more contemporary times – the decorative patterns found in fabric stores, this artist book employs strategies of repetition and re-surfacing. Images repeat across its pages, as patterns come together to make new versions of themselves in contemporary incarnations of familiar forms. The printed texts read: ‘What is such an obsession? It is something or someone that always comes back, survives everything, reappears at intervals, and expresses a truth concerning an original state of affairs. It is something or someone that one cannot forget, and yet is impossible to recognize clearly.' (Georges Didi-Huberman The Surviving Image, Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms, Aby Warburg's History of Art Pennsylvania: The University of Pennsylvania Press 2017 (originally published in French in 2002). p 13.) Haunts Hantise Haunting was made in response to conversations with Angela Brennan.
Increments tests the parameters of the artist book form in its establishment of the page as a visual field. This work draws on the history of minimalist abstraction (Agnes Martin, as one precedent) and pairs this visual sensibility with a text from contemporary Australian literature: Gerald Murnane’s complex interrogation of the notion of looking. (Murnane, G. 2017. Border Districts. Sydney: Giramondo Publishing. p 117). This book is made with thanks to Leslie Eastman for our discussions about the subtle changes of light observable between sunrise and sunset, sunset and darkness. It is also informed by our joint curiosity about the acuity of observation. It is further informed by my interests in what can be heard if carefully listening, and in a quiet life.
Marian Crawford and Francesca Jurate Sasnaitis GINTARAS / AMBER, 2019 Gintaras is Lithuanian for amber. Writer Sasnaitis's family originates from Lithuania, one of the Baltic states where amber has been gathered, mined, traded and treasured since antiquity. In this collaborative artist book, amber represents the turbulent relationship between earth and air, stasis and movement, father and daughter. Sasnaitis's text weaves between Crawford's images of traditional Baltic textile patterns and pages of brilliantly coloured cellophane that imitate the infinite variegations of amber.
