Plunge (2010)

Plunge (2010)
Chisato Tamabayashi
Casebound, cloth over boards. Pop-up book. H193 x W152 mm. [12] pages. Collinge & Clark, 6 August 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission from Chisato Tamabayashi.

“This book begins with a dive into the sea, down into the deep and back again, encountering various creatures on the way. The pages are designed to be held and angled in different ways so that the reader can explore the depths and the two sides of the sea’s surface.”–Artist’s statement

It is a pleasure to touch and turn the pages forming the surface and bed of the sea on which the pop-ups and movable elements rise, fall and move. The screen printing with TW graphics ink (pigment ink) enrich the book’s freshness and vibrancy. These photos and very brief video further below do little justice to Plunge and only hint at the sheer fun of manipulating it.

Pages: Simili Japon paper 225gsm. Pop-ups, hand cut by scalpel from Murano pastel paper 160gsm and Colorplan paper 175gsm.

As the double-page spread below shows, Tamabayashi thinks and crafts “in the round” to position his paper sculpture to suggest a sea turtle’s motion through the water.

To the central pop-up of intertwining coral, the artist has added a tab to pull along the small inhabitants of the reef.

The smaller paste-down jellyfish add a sub-surface background and depth to the large pop-up jellyfish in center stage.

The strings of fish at the end brilliantly create the effect of shoals of fish whether the double-page spread is viewed upright or suspended. Tamabayashi has collaborated with the artist Tomás Saraceno on From Arachnophobia to Arachnophilia, produced by the Library Council for the Museum of Modern Art. Despite their small size, these fish in Plunge remind me of the suspended mylar globes of Saraceno’s monumental Thermodynamic Constellation in the courtyard of Palazzo Strozzi in 2020.

Plunge received the Doverodde Book Arts Centre of Denmark Award, 2nd Prize, in 2011. His work Airborne from that same year features in an insightfully curated exhibition called “Translation” in the Museum of Imagined Kent (University of Kent). There, his work is compared to Mitsumasa Anno’s two-dimensional My Journey (1977). To appreciate the “in the round” nature of Tamabayashi’s pop-ups in Plunge, look to Ron King’s Matisse’s Model (1996), and compare the treatment of perspectives in Plunge and Matisse’s Model with the fixed points of view in Katsumi Komagata’s Little Tree (2008) and Carol Barton’s Land Forms and Air Currents (2014).

Further Reading and Viewing

“Alphabets Alive! – The ABCs of Form & Structure“. 19 July 2023. Books On Books Collection.

“Carol Barton“. 10 August 2024. Books On Books Collection.

“Ron King“. 1 March 2021. Books On Books Collection.

“Katsuo Komagata (I)“. 22 March 2020. Books On Books Collection.

NSV3.30 July 2024. “Translation“. The Museum of Imagined Kent. University of Kent.