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In The Open | Gordian Projects

Gordian Projects is an independent not-for-profit press established in 2014. We focus on small editions of work that use art and language as a space for exploration, operating at the intersection of artist’s book, art writing, literature, and archive. We work with artists and authors collaboratively in planning, designing and producing their publications. Our editorial and advisory board includes Judit Bodor (editor), Emma Bolland (editor), Georgia Dearden (advisor), Roddy Hunter (advisor), Brian Lewis (advisor), Tom Rodgers (editor), and Penny Whitworth (advisor). Our books are held in collections including the V&A Art Library and the Saison Poetry Library collection at the Royal Festival Hall.

We have selected four of our titles for Land2: MilkyWayYouWillHearMeCall (hardback edition), Echoes From a Berlin Childhood, East Wind, and 10,500 Miles. These publications examine landscapes and terrain, rural, urban, and in between, from a range of perspectives. The emotion of place, the political structures of landscape, the walking body, immersion, endurance, and detached observation are examined through image, essay, performance, poetry, and research.

The Publications and Author/Artist Biographies:

10,500 Miles, Kotryna Juskaite and Kim Lindgren, 2017

  • Skewed postcards of a casual photography lay themselves out like curling scraps on a tilted pin-board... Part photo-essay and part travel diary, 10,500 Miles narrates a road-trip with dissociative cool.
  • Kotryna Juskaite and Kim Lundgren are recent graduates of Leeds Beckett University. Photographers and designers who are interested in the exploration of the travelled environment through experimental collages and book design. 10,500 Miles is their first publication.

Echoes From A Berlin Childhood, Helen Clarke, 2016

Images and texts in this publication investigate the female body as represented in the public space of the street. A flȃneuse walks the streets of Berlin, looking for Walter Benjamin. Benjamin’s memoir A Berlin Childhood Around 1900 acts as a guide for these walks, which took place in August 2016, meditating on the Benjamin who said that ‘I have long, indeed for years, played with the idea of setting out the sphere of life—bios—graphically on a map.’

  • Helen Clarke is an artist, writer and researcher currently working with ‘embodied methodologies’ and ideas of the contemporary flâneuse, and recently co-edited The Lost Diagrams of Walter Benjamin (2017)

East Wind, Brian Lewis, 2015

‘Burton Pidsea passes into the riding and there is nothing out there to think with. I won’t remember. Malcolm would have sent us cross-country, the woods and contours had specific values, a knowledge that we moved through. I pretended to use the compass in my pocket, black arrow, red needle. In time it became a pretend compass. I learned to read a map by fixing a position and rotating the map around me. I made everything the north…’ A set of three hand-stitched and stamped pamphlets in a numbered edition of 25, East Wind is a sequence of lyrical essays and haiku that narrate the author’s walk from Hull to Withernsea and Hornsea over the 10th and 11th May 2014. A second unnumbered edition is now available as a single pamphlet.

  • Brian Lewis is a poet, essayist, walker, and filmmaker. His endurance walking practice informs a lyrical and historical investigation into the histories and infrastructures of the North of England. He is also the editor and publisher at Longbarrow Press.

MilkyWayYouWillHearMeCall, (collected works), Judit Bodor, Emma Bolland, and Tom Rodgers, 2017

MilkyWayYouWillHearMeCall is a handmade hardback unnumbered edition that documents a collaborative research project which explored the relationship between place, memory and mourning. The research involved visiting the sites where the women killed by Peter Sutcliffe were found in the 1970s and 1980 to create a co-authored body of work that integrates visual practice, curatorial intervention, research, documentation, and fictional and theoretical writing.

  • Judit Bodor is a curator, researcher, lecturer, and archivist who has published and lectured widely. She recently curated the Ivor Davies retrospective Silent Explosion at the National Museum of Wales.
  • Emma Bolland is an artist, writer, lecturer, and researcher currently working with the expanded screenplay as a site for art practice. She has published widely, from academic journals such as GeoHumanities and The Blue Notebook, to creative texts in anthologies and monographs.
  • Tom Rodgers is an artist, designer, and educator, working with digital and analogue photography. His artist’s books are held in National collections, including the V&A Art Library.

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