Title: Canto 1000
|
Title: Canto 1147
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Title: Canto 1158
|
Title: Canto 1170
|
Title: Canto 1188
|
Title: Canto 1228
|
Title: Canto 1261
|
Title: Canto 1284
|
Title: Canto 1301
|
Title: Canto 1314
|
Title: Canto 1371
|
Title: Canto 1384
|
Title: Canto 1417
|
Title: Canto 1479
|
Title: Canto 1523
|
Title: Canto 1524
|
Title: Canto 1534
|
Title: Canto 1537
|
Title: Canto 1553
|
Title: Canto 1628
|
Title: Canto 1630
|
Title: Canto 1671
|
Title: Canto 1676
|
Title: Canto 1718
|
Title: Canto 1723
|
Title: Canto 1767
|
Title: Canto 1811
|
Title: Canto 1819
|
Title: Canto 1829
|
Title: Canto 1844
|
Title: Canto 1848
|
Title: Canto 1871
|
Title: Canto 1931
|
Title: Canto 1937
|
Title: Canto 1961
|
Title: Canto 1965
|
Title: Canto 1985
|
Title: Canto 2056
|
Title: Canto 2073
|
Title: Canto 2131
|
Title: Canto 2239
|
Title: Canto 2250
|
Title: Canto 2274
|
Title: Canto 2286
|
Title: Canto 2324
|
Title: Canto 2373
|
Title: Canto 2378
|
Title: Canto 2382
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STATEMENT
Where Hours of Devotion was Bailey's intial response to the Coutts archive commission – please refer to the accompanying essay to that series - Shelf Life is a separate, self-contained visual essay to emerge from her involvement with the books in Angela Burdett-Coutts’ library. By contrast to the emphasis on the pages and content that lies between the tooled leather covers of these tomes, Bailey has shifted her focus to the bindings themselves – verso and recto - cropping uniformly to endow particular significance to their spines.
The images are a testament to the process and wear of time, light and the occasional reader. The surfaces - marbled card, spun cloth or soft animal skin - retain the battle scars of use. Formerly adjacent library books of different heights have left ghostly light shadows on the bindings of their neighbours. The spines themselves, proudly displaying the gold embossed decorations typical of the nineteenth century, have been subjected to Bailey's editorial instinct. As in the Postscript series, where she deliberately denied the viewer access to the specific contents of the love letters, the titles here have
been digitally removed, erased from their rightful and expected positions. This de-contextualising imparts a stronger visual impact, presenting us with simple spare fields of colour. Each is now is bestowed with its original library index number, though now pre-fixed with Canto. The poetical implications are obvious – from Dante to Byron to Pound – but it also imposes a rhythm upon the rich tonalities of colour. In visual terms, the reference is less specifically poetical, than paying fealty to those such as Rothko, and above all Barnett Newman own series of 18 Cantos from 1963-4.
Although here utilising the medium of photography and taking as her subject the luscious surfaces fashioned by Victorian book-binders, Bailey's cantos do reflect 'a form, mood, colour beat, scale and key' similar to the lithographs that Newman created in his 18 Cantos. Each image can stand alone, but undoubtedly the 48 in the series offer a multiplicity of unique arrangements, creating almost infinite rhythms of different cadences and resonance. Like Newman, Bailey accepts that any “attempt
to describe something which is alive is impossible”; in his essays Ezra Pound wrote
of rhythm as ' the hardest quality of a man's style to counterfeit'. Shelf Life in a sense is her offering to her audience to do with what they will, her invocation to the viewer to compose his or her own visual “boogie woogie”.
PRINT INFORMATION
Edition 12 + 3 A/P. C Type Print. Fuji Crystal Archive Paper.
Print size 1: 370 x 290mm. Edition 12
All artwork and images © Veronica Bailey 2024.
