A Slow Air (2016)

A Slow Air (2016)
Thomas A. Clark and Diane Howse
Perfect bound softcover. H200 x W150 mm. 64 pages. Edition of 750. Acquired at the Small Publishers Book Fair, London, in 2018.
Photos of the work: Books On Books Collection.

If you live where red kites thrive, you will see them most often singly, in pairs or threes. If you are lucky, you may see as many as eight or ten at a time. Near Harewood House in West Yorkshire where red kites were reintroduced in 1999, there are hundreds. In 2016, photographer/artist Diane Howse (Countess of Harewood) and poet/artist Thomas A. Clark collaborated on an exhibition at Harewood House: the grove of delight.  Using objects, words and images, the exhibition turned the house’s Terrace Gallery into a symbolic grove; also displayed was a series of 15 photographs by Howse of red kites over Harewood. For the exhibition and under the direction of Peter Foolen, the diligent Dutch publisher of herman de vries, Peter Liversidge and others, A Slow Air (the book) was produced and published by Harewood House. Foolen and the artists have assembled and manipulated the photos in a sequence of color and image that exerts a forward movement like a film or narrative. Like a real sighting of these birds circling and banking as if to a slow musical air, the book mesmerizes.

The fore edge of the book shows the progresssion of full-page bleeds on every page that plays a significant role in that forward momentum. They also underscore though the constraint that book structure imposes on the momentum. The images may not have margins as frames, but the trimmed edges impose their own static boundaries.

To explore or interrogate those boundaries, other book artists have used the scroll or leporellos or fore edge folds with stab binding or fold outs or Hedi Kyle panorama structures. The scroll of The Pond at Deuchar (2011) and the leporellos of Follow the River (2015-17) by Helen Douglas do that, aided by choices of watery and gauzy Chinese papers. Detour (1989) by Jan Voss demonstrates how images can turn with the page in a codex almost triple the length of A Slow Air. Marlene MacCallum’s sleep walk (2023) presents complex continuities and discontinuities of sky, lake and shore over time from a single vantage point with full-page bleeds and fold outs. Shona Grant’s Tide Lines (2020) uses a full-page bleeds and a panoramic concertina to turn the limitations of page edges inside out. It is possible even for the trimmed codex to interrogate its edges. Two very different ways of doing it can be found in Chinese Whispers (1975) by Helen Douglas and Telfer Stokes and Around the Corner (2020) by Ximena Pérez Grobet.

In processing color, pushing the edges of its trim, and structuring the sequence of images taken from the photo exhibition, A Slow Air achieves much and inhabits that gray area between photobook and artist’s book.

Further Reading

“Helen Douglas“. 24 February 2020. Books On Books Collection.

“Shona Grant“. 20 October 2019. Books On Books Collection.

“Ximena Pérez Grobet“. 7 July 2021. Books On Books Collection.

“Jan Voss“. 25 June 2024. Books On Books Collection.