Water Paper Stone : a walk-through book by Judy O'Shea

SAN FRANCISCO CENTER FOR THE BOOK SE PTEMBE R 5 THROUGH DECEMBE R 6, 2014

WATER PAPER STONE : A WALK-THROUGH BOOK authored by judy o’shea in exhibition at the San Francisco Center for the Book September 5 – December 6, 2014 EXHIBITION COORDINATION FOR SFCB

Kathleen Burch CATALOG DESIGN COVER PHOTOS COPY EDITOR

Kathleen Burch

Mike O’Shea

Samantha Hamady

PRINTING Inkworks Press Berkeley, California ISBN

978-1-929646-08-1

2014 by the artists and the San Francisco Center for the Book 375 Rhode Island Street San Francisco, California 94103 sfcb.org This catalog was designed using Tangent typefaces by Terminal Design.

The SFCB logo was created by Studio Hinrichs.

A portion of the purchase price of this exhibition catalog helps fund the operation of the San Francisco Center for the Book, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization.

THIS EXHIBITION MADE POSSIBLE

BY THE GENEROUS SUPPORT OF

Kahle Austin Foundation San Francisco Foundation San Francisco Grants for the Arts

board of directors of the san francisco center for the book Mary Austin, President Kathleen Burch, Vice President Coleen Curry Alan Dye Wally Jansen Mary Laird Margaret Miller Brooks Roddan Kathleen Rydar Donna Seager Anne Smith Duff Axsom, Emeritus Curtiss Taylor, Emeritus

sfcb staff Cheryl Itamura Chad Johnson Malgosia Kostecka Alex Lin Jeff Thomas Lesya Westerman

exhibition committee Mary Austin, Kathleen Burch, Macy Chadwick, Sas Colby, Samantha Hamady, Jennie Hinchcliff, Chad Johnson and Alyson Kuhn; Marie Dern, honorary member

about the sfcb The San Francisco Center for the Book, founded in 1996, is the center of inspiration for the book arts world of the West Coast, featuring the art and craft of letterpress printing, bookbinding & artists’ book­making.

We are dedicated to the art of the book!

The SFCB was co-founded by Mary Austin and Kathleen Burch, who recognized a growing need in San Francisco and the Bay Area for a facility specifically designed and equipped for the book arts. The first of its kind on the West Coast, the SFCB now offers over 300 workshops and many free events every year, including the annual street fair Roadworks: A Steamroller Printing Festival.

In addition to workshops and events, there is a thriving artist-in-residence program, producing numerous artists’ books every year, and collaborations with many local non-profits, museums, and libraries. The SFCB also hosts special visits and hands-on demonstrations for students of all ages, teachers, librarians, corporate team building, collectors, visiting printers, artists, writers and designers.

TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S 24 Chantal Armagnac 10 Carole Beadle 12 Richard Berger 14 Kay Bradner 16 Bernard Cauhapé 18 Catherine Choron-Baix 20 Michel Cubilié 22 Marianna Goodheart 24 François Grand-Clément 26 Sylvie Gravellard 28 Charles Hobson 30 Michel Julliard 6 Dedication Judy O’Shea created the Dust Cover, Front Cover, and Back Cover of the installation.

All photographs by Mike O’Shea unless otherwise noted.

7 Artist’s Statement Judy O’Shea

32 Carolyn Miller 2, 34 Mike O’Shea 36 Dan Pillers

8 Home Is Where the Heart Goes An Artist’s Experience Alice Wingwall

38 Jean-Michel Prêt

48 Colophon

8, 44 Alice Wingwall

40 Inge Roberts

D E D I C AT I O N

Water Paper Stone : A Walk-Through Book is dedicated to Mike O’Shea, with whom my ego, my life, and my love are safe.

He’s held our creative life together with his gentle but continual exploration of media and ideas, and his encouragement and critiques guide everything I do.

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P R E FAC E : A R T I S T ’S S TAT E M E N T

Water Paper Stone : A Walk-Through Book is the final chapter of a more than seventeen-year journey of artistic exploration. In 1993, when given the opportunity to return to school for a master’s degree in fine art, I chose instead to invite artists, mostly professors, to stay and work with me and my husband, Mike, at the eighteenth-century watermill that we had restored in the Aveyron department of France. For over seventeen years, we hosted American and French artists at La Pilande Basse, which sits in a steep canyon with the Mousse River rushing past and through its stone walls.

Instead of professors observing me, I was able to observe them, so I not only learned technique but experienced a wide variety of artistic approaches.

I learned to trust my instincts; that aesthetic decisions are arbitrary, not absolute; that the complexity of a work is the culmination of solving problems in its making; that if the integrity of the idea is solid, the work will follow, and that a work of art can be perfect in its imperfection.

The most important lesson, however, was that we all stand on the shoulders of other artists, and when we come together, the result is true synergy, as in this walk-through book.

When invited to write a chapter or page, each of the other eighteen artists created original work that relates to their experience at the mill. Just as the heart of our experience in France was our rapport with guest artists, their contributions form the pages of this artists’ book.

J U DY O ’S H E A

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HOME IS WHERE THE HEART GOES : A N A R T I S T ’S E X P E R I E N C E

I stand just inside the very tall windows of the mill room, grasping the long handle of the right glass panel to open the window. The roar of the river rapids rushes in, and at least one handful of words falls forward over the sill, down toward the rapids, falling among the boulders.

The words are all French, falling from my mouth as I gasp at the plunging of the water. I try to catch some words, to return them to my mouth and ears, like grabbing for potato chips.

Water, and the sound of its falling, had surrounded my working, and sleeping, and eating for a total of eight weeks over six years. In my workroom in the lower barn, words hovered, even in the silence of wrapping and coloring and drawing. Letters paraded silently on upper beams and ledges, whispering together to form words, sometimes huddled over my shoulders, sometimes curling around these shoulders to listen to what I was writing, one letter after another, on the seat of one chair or another.

Laundry tubs and a toilet lined one wall of the barn workroom, and tool storage and supplies covered one more wall beyond my large work table, where rolls of cord, cloth, plastic garden ground covers, and cutting tools littered the surface. Around this table stood several plastic chairs, filled with linen rope, rocks and letters, waiting for my transformations of them. And the words whispering and parading and dancing their shapes into sounds, shaped the room as much as did the walls and laundry tubs. Yes, sounds and the sound of language had made this barn workspace mine. The sound of words and the sound of rushing waters encircled my imagining and my formations.

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A L I C E W I N GWA L L

CAROLE BEADLE

Interchange 2014 Stitched and burned silk 40” x 60” x 30” (two pieces)

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RICHARD BERGER

Working Drawings for Floor at La Pilande Basse Floor tiles 1998 Vellum panels 2014 40” x 60” (four pieces) Four vellum drawings used in locating and transferring thumb print images of Mike and Judy O’Shea to a tile floor.

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K AY B R A D N E R

26 days @ La Pilande Basse 2014 Intaglio: drypoint, aquatint, engraving, photogravure printed a la poupee Size including frame: 36” x 70” x 18” Page size: 37” x 11” with 26 pages The 26 banner pages hang on a wooden frame and represent the 26 days of Kay’s visit to La Pilande Basse in 1999.

The engraved text and drawings chronicle people and places visited, landscapes drawn, meals enjoyed.

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This one-of-a-kind book was printed on paper made by Judy O’Shea.

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B E R N A R D C AU H A P É

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Et que la vie sorte des livres (Antonin Artaud) (And so books come to life) 2014 Paper, ink, acrylic, tape 275� x 12�

Transparence des mots, images que nous donnons les textes (Transparent words, the images that we give to texts)

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C AT H E R I N E C H O R O N - B A I X

From Daudet to Judy 2014 Calligraphy 100” x 20” Livre accordéon, calligraphié

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MICHEL CUBILIÉ

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Sans titre

2014 Acrylic on paper 69” x 40”

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MARIANNA GOODHEART

Ricordare I & II 1997 Ricordare I: Two hanging panels Chalk pastels 52” x 55” Two chalk pastel rubbings of the stone walls in the studio/barn at La Pilande Basse 2014 Ricordare II: One hanging screen with three panels Mixed materials 27” x 36” x 16” Hanging screen of three panels with chalk pastel inserts Photographs: Jay Daniel

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F R A N Ç O I S G R A N D - C L É M E N T | C H A N TA L A R M AG N AC

Like a Wheel of a Watermill 2014 PVC expansé, bois de cyprès, Altuglas, papier 6’ x 4.5’ x 1’ The mobile is composed of two pairs of triple spirals, each pair having opposing rotating planes reflecting light in different ways.

The spirals are weighted by octahedron stars in cypress wood.

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In the interior of each pair, encircling the axis, is another spiral in paper, on which text

by Chantal Armagnac is written in French for one, in English for the other.

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S Y LV I E G R AV E L L A R D

Cum-crescere, croître ensemble (Coming together, growing together) 2014 Banner: mixed media, ceramic, paper, textile, India ink

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11.5’ x 12”

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CHARLES HOBSON

Matisse’s Fishing Pole 2014 Canvas, acrylic, knitting needles, digital images, paint brush, Fabriano paper 14” x 14” x 2” Matisse’s Fishing Pole is a scroll book built inside a stretched canvas with a French door binding, covered boards and sewn pages.

Images on the scroll are of the swimming area at Trésbas-les-Bains, a small riverside village near Plaisance, where Mike & Judy O’Shea’s mill, La Pilande Basse, was located.

Images on the French door pages are paintings of bathers by Matisse that he made between 1909 and 1914. They are a counterpoint to the scroll images of bathers at Trésbas.

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Photographs: Charles Hobson

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MICHEL JULLIARD

Untitled 2014 Acrylic and wood block on paper

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11.5’ x 3’

C A R O LY N M I L L E R

La Pilande Basse 2014 Watercolor 7” x 118”

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Illustrated poem Accordion-fold artist’s book

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M I K E O ’S H E A

The Spine 2014 Mixed Media (Cyanotype also shown as frontispiece, page 2) 20’ x 7’ For over seventeen years I lived in a watermill in France.

The restoration of the mill­ works was a major part of my work there, along with working with guest artists from the U.S. and France.

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The spine of this walkthrough book is an homage to that body of work.

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DA N P I L L E R S

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From My Journal 2014 Etched glass, wood 16” x 16” x 3” Thirteen-page book with etched glass pages.

Photographs: Dan Pillers

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JEAN-MICHEL PRÊT

A Beautiful History of a Happy Land 2014 8.66’ x 2.75’ Six sheets of aquarell paper, folded and superposed with drawing recto / verso.

Prêt is a ceramic artist, painter, and interior space designer, who lives and works in the Aveyron department in France.

He and Mike O’Shea collaborated for several years using printing techniques developed by O’Shea and ways of sculpting ceramics perfected by Prêt culminating in several major shows in France.

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INGE ROBERTS

INGE ROBERTS

Embroidered Dreams 2014 Porcelain, water colors, charcoal Imprinted, stained porcelain (fired to cone 10 in oxidation); rubber, steel 6’ x 6’ x 2” Nine porcelain pillows using impressions of French linens on one side and a German game, Mühle (or Mill) drawn on the back. Scattered on the floor below this “page” are nine blue and nine white game pieces.

Photographs: Michael Stadler

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A L I C E W I N GWA L L

La Pilande Basse; Pages Bound by Chairs with Orange Clamps 2014 Plastic chairs, drawings, photo books, postcards, and clamps plus leashed stonecarved ram 36” x 57” x 24”

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Plastic chairs returned from the mill and assembled with others to hold drawing and photo books bound to the ensemble by clips and cords, awaiting imagination

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C O LO P H O N T H I S WA L K-T H R O U G H B O O K

is an edition of one, dated September 2014, by nineteen American and French artists, writers, and poets.

Each page contains references to the artists’ experience while visiting La Pilande Basse in the Aveyron department of France, and was produced uniquely for this one-of-a-kind artists’ book.

The front cover is of hand-cast kozo fibers, first formed into fifteen eighteen-foot sheets, then blasted with water to form waves of paper.

The paper was then splashed and exposed to the sun with a cyanotype light-sensitive treatment, forming paper, which was then transformed into the floating wall of stones, the back cover.

Buried in the stone wall are the last two paragraphs of the printed book.

Each page in between has its own special story.

A special thanks goes to the San Francisco Center for the Book for sponsoring this installation.

J U DY O ’S H E A