Anne Lydiat

Cover of a book titled 'A Maiden's Voyage' by Anne Lydiat, featuring an anchor graphic and the publisher Rocktheboat Press, London.

A Maiden’s Voyage (2015)
Anne Lydiat
Paperback. H145 x W180 mm. 36 pages. Edition of 50, of which this #31. Acquired from the artist, 28 August 2026.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Anne Lydiat’s A Maiden’s Voyage (2015) pays homage to the Belgian conceptual artist Marcel Broodthaer’s “book-film’” A Voyage on the North Sea (1973).

Two art books displayed side by side. The left book is titled 'A Maiden's Voyage' by Anne Lydiat, published by Rocktheboat Press, London, featuring an anchor illustration. The right book is titled 'A Voyage on the North Sea' by Marcel Broodthaers, published by Petersburg Press, London, featuring a nautical illustration.

The reader/viewer of Broodthaers’ book faced three challenges, the first two of which are outlined in its preface. The first, whether to cut or not cut its uncut pages and reveal or leave hidden its page numbers. The second, to make sense of its juxtaposition and manipulation of images of a 19th century sailing ship painting and a photographed 20th century yacht. The third challenge was access to its associated film (which only came with the deluxe edition) and make sense of its relation to the book.

The reader/viewer of Lydiat’s homage does not face that first challenge. She is explicit in her preface —”there are no cutting remarks” — and the book is fully trimmed top, bottom, and fore edge. Her disavowal’s phrasing, however, slyly envelopes the reader/viewer in a different challenge. Does this homage really have no “cutting remarks”, no rebukes? Noting the rarity of depictions of women in maritime history, the second paragraph concludes otherwise: “this artist’s book is a space that marks this gendered absence”. A Maiden’s Voyage pays a passive/aggressive homage to a male artist and his work that unconsciously participates in that gendered absence.

Open book pages with text discussing Marcel Broodthaers and his work, including 'A Maiden's Voyage' and 'A Voyage on the North Sea'. The left page features a black and white photo of a boat at sea, while the right page shows a historical image of women and a child on a ship.

We still have the second challenge with A Maiden’s Voyage: to make sense of its juxtaposition and manipulation of images.

Lydiat is an accomplished artist working in photography, sculpture, and installations as well as books. She could have chosen to work her found painting and subject of gendered absence into another medium, another frame. But she chose the medium of the book and the frame of Broodthaers’ A Voyage and his projected Analyse d’une Peinture. While A Voyage juxtaposes present and past images, A Maiden’s Voyage contains no such juxtapositions. Paradoxically it makes itself the juxtaposition of present and past. Lydiat has juxtaposed her “space” with Broodthaers’ artist’s book and intent. Her space is the present; his space is the past.

The title of Broodthaers’ projected project implies that the subject of A Voyage concerns the analysis of a painting, an expensive one at that. In parallel and contrast, Lydiat takes a cheap found painting of the past and “analyzes” it, breaking it down into clipped details, stripping it of color, and framing the results as Broodthaers did in A Voyage. In doing so, she underscores that her present space is shaped by the past, implicitly arguing that “gendered absence” in the past shapes the present. It is not a situation that Lydiat lets lie. By contrasting the costs of the found paintings, she neatly slips in one of those disavowed “cutting remarks”.

An open book displaying two pages: on the left, a colorful painting of ships sailing in rough waters, and on the right, a black-and-white illustration featuring a group of people in a small boat, surrounded by sails.

From A Maiden’s Voyage.

An open book displaying two images: on the left, a color painting of a classic sailing ship on the water; on the right, a black and white photograph of a sailboat sailing on the ocean.

From A Voyage on the North Sea © Broodthaers Estate. Photo: Books On Books Collection.

A spread of a book page featuring five maritime paintings, including ships on water and a group of people in a small boat.

From A Maiden’s Voyage.

An open book page displaying four small images of sailing ships on water, alongside a larger, vibrant painting of similar boats navigating the ocean.

An open book featuring two pages with paintings of maritime scenes; the left page shows a colorful image of sailing ships on calm waters, while the right page displays a black-and-white illustration of a small boat with several people navigating through rough seas.

From A Maiden’s Voyage.

As for the third challenge, the Fondation Marcel Broodthaers provided a solution for access. Likewise, Anne Lydiat provides a link to her film that accompanied the maiden launch of A Maiden Voyage at Chelsea Cafe Project (Chelsea College of Arts).

Like Broodthaers’ “book-film” (his term), Lydiat’s book-film presents image frames as numbered pages. At least since Dick Higgins’ introduction of the term “intermedia” in the mid ’60s, interest in the hybrid work that crosses media and occupies the space between painting, film, music, performance, installation, sculpture, the book, computers, and now the Web has grown — especially among book artists. In 2013, the topic held center stage at the MCBA Book Art Biennial in an exhibition entitled “Directed: The Intersection of Book, Film and Visual Narrative”. Works recently added to the Books On Books Collection occupy this intermedial space (see examples below). Anne Lydiat’s book-film A Maiden Voyage brings the added edge of appropriating form, technique, and content from an arch-appropriator and focusing them on a persistent social blindspot.

I first came across Anne Lydiat’s work at the Wittockiana in Brussels. There in the a minima exhibition was Lost for Words … (1999). Displayed as below, no one could tell that it is a blank book. Not even the subtlety of the blind embossed ISBN on the back could be seen, nor could the quotation from Maurice Blanchot on the inside flap (“About this book I had promised myself to say nothing …”). The context of the exhibition was a hint about the book’s theme — or an aspect of it — “absence, loss and nothingness” — as Lydiat’s website notes.

A closed book with a plain cover featuring the title 'lost for words...' in gray text.

Lost for Words… (1999) by Anne Lydiat also appeared in the exhibition Blank. Raw. Illegible…Artists Books as Statements, 1960-2022 (2023) organized by Moritz Küng.

Although not a part of the Books On Books Collection (at least not yet), it is mentioned here as an additional gloss on her intermedial style of conceptual art. Lost for Words … first appeared in an exhibition at the Freud Museum entitled “Permission to Speak”, after which it was deposited in Sigmund Freud’s library. So where is the intermediality? It lies in her performance of secretly depositing Lost for Words … in libraries that she has visited around the world. The only means of knowing where they are is the follow-up volume — … of the book — which lists the libraries.

Books On Books

Curated by Robert Bolick

Books On Books Collection – Anne Lydiat

Further Reading