RECENT EDITIONS
Loch
Helen Douglas, Loch, Weproductions, 2005, 28pp, 195 x 105mm, printed offset b&w, french folds, black cover with inset title. Edition 500. Price £8. (ISBN 0 9550987 5 0).
Inspired by the Scottish landscape Loch presents 20 roundel vignettes with fine linear renderings of water surfaces, plants, reeds and reflections.
Illiers Combray
Helen Douglas, Zoë Irvine. Illiers Combray, Aeolus & Weproductions, 2004, 114pp, 92 x 92 mm, (ISBN 0 9523284 6 1)
Two mini audio CDs, (18 mins each) placed within a 2 sided concertina book 9x9cm, 120pp, printed offset, full colour. End pockets, printed CD labels, board cover, embossed title, red fastening band, Edition 500, Price £25 + £1 pp payable to Weproductions, Deuchar Mill, Yarrow, Scotland TD7 5LA
Sound artist Zoë Irvine and visual artist Helen Douglas collaborate to create a richly textured, multi layered soundscape composition (2 CDs: Irvine) and ornately interwoven visual narrative (2 sided concertina book: Douglas), exploring a sense of memory and place. Inspired in the month of May by a week long visit to Illiers Combray, the small town immortalized by Marcel Proust in his epic novel In Search of Lost Time, Irvine and Douglas weave together their own distinct mythologies and reveries; their subjective responses elliptically united by their shared sense of place.
This book won the Birgit Skiöld Memorial Trust Award LAB 04 and the Seoul International Book Arts Award 2005.
Pivot
Douglas, Helen. Evans, T. Pivot, Weproductions 2003, Text and Images, Full colour. Offset Litho. 48pp, Limp sewn, 150 x 107 mm, (ISBN 0952328402)
Douglas, Helen. Evans, T. Pivot 2003 (ISBN 0952328402)
Pivot combines the placing of both images and a poem by Thomas Evans in a spatial relationship to the page. Both the poem and the imagery concern themselves with a pared down minimalism caught at a specific moment when mass was spared and definition became integrated in a form of quirky detail.
8 Minutes
Stokes, Telfer. 8 Minutes, 2002, 114pp, 190 x 142 mm, (ISBN 0952328445)
The title 8 Minutes refers to the time it takes light from the sun to reach Earth. Sunlight is exposure. Looking in certain qualities of light at the man made, human feelings and emotions are discovered embodied in the structures & edifices we construct and inhabit and that we continue to use and re-use.
Unravelling the Ripple
Douglas, Helen. Unravelling the Ripple, pocketbooks, Edinburgh, 2001. 76pp, 170 x 127 mm, (ISBN 0748663037)
This book could be bound as a circle, the pages like spokes on a wheel, a turning investigation of the sea, a continuity that folds back on itself, a walk that went all the way around an island to end at its beginning... The sea that always seems I like a metaphor but one that is always moving, can not be fixed, like a heart that is like a tongue that is like a mystery that is like a story that is like a border that is like something altogether different and like everything at once the treasure that always runs through your fingers and never runs out.
A portrait of of a Hebridean island tideline by Helen Douglas, this beautiful visual book unfolds as a single photographic image flowing through the textures and rhythms of sand, wrack and wave.
With an essay by Rebecca Solnit.
Last Day in Kas
Douglas, Helen. Last Day in Kas, Nexus Press in collaboration with Weproductions, Yarrow, 2001. 76pp, 116 x 116 mm, four colour offset on l2Ogsm Strathmore Beau Brilliant with card cover, edition 1000. (ISBN 093252690X)
Last Day in Kas gathers the temporal and particular within the poignancy of a last day. As a form of distilled life, the book is linked through a sideways looking and walking. Places of delineated boundary and shifting ambiguity between display and protection, attraction and rebuff are negotiated through a light, touching and yielding eye. The hand as expression of primary intelligence and articulation is evoked in hand-wrought ironwork, tangible objects, tended flowers and touchable textures. With the turning of pages and dappled interplay between image, print and paper the reader's eye and hand are actively engaged in this giving and receiving to ponder the meaning of gift.
BECOME
Stokes, Telfer. BECOME, Weproductions, Yarrow, 2000. 108pp, 19 x 14.25 cms, Offset, Edition 1000 (ISBN 0952328453)
The message is of hope and optimism that the beginning of every day, dawn, is a potent reminder of renewal which I see as spiritual awareness.
This potential hovers in the early section of the book and then flows into full colour as the rhythm of the song that is sung by the reader takes shape. This book has been made to be performed using the letters of the words as notes which are placed on the page to correspond to their pitch.
WILD WOOD
Douglas, Helen. Wild Wood, Weproductions, Yarrow, 1999. 144 pp, 11.6 x 16 cm, offset, edition 1000.
Wild Wood has been conceived as a Border Ballad and takes as its inspiration the Carrifran Wildwood project and the ancient woods at Deuchar and Tinnis Stiel in Yarrow.
Opening the book and turning the pages is analogous to entering and exploring the Wild Wood where different moods and feelings move the viewer through the visual narrative.
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