Vibeke Luther O ́Rourke
Norway
www.crowpress.no/
Vårvann (Spring Meltwater, eng translation)
2023 – 2024
Letterpress, woodcut & hand bookbinding, printed on Japanese paper. Copper, latex and perspex, finished with gold tooling
8.27 x 8.27 inches
Artist Statement
This project consists of twelve unique books or objects made in a timespan of a year. The starting point of the project is a poem by Norwegian poet Steinar Opstad, Vårvann (Spring Meltwater in English).
The poem echoes the writings survived from the Greek philosopher Heraclitus and his fragments on waters´ changeable nature, how it comes together and flows away, always in flux with an unmanageable form and never repeated.
The poet interprets and treats water as a charged and mystic substance. Like the sentence: floating roots with tendrils which drag the soul down to the bottom, describes water as dark, bottomless matter with claustrophobic sensations. This captured me and set me to search for materials reflecting changeable, airy, unusual and sometimes unmanageable properties.
I chose a fluorescent Perspex sheet covering hand set and letterpress printed pages to emphasize the sentence: Water which makes letters float up from the pages of book. This allows the viewer to look through a glass like surface whilst for example latex is used to underline the feeling and sensation of drowning from the poem:
Claustrophobia’s water The water of all barriers and all longings
I have worked with Steinar Opstad since 2019 and he has given me permission to use his writing and poetry for many of my Artists´ Books, and together we work under the private press, Crow Press. The collaborative effort has given me a unique insight of writing methods, the struggle of writing poetry, how poetry is produced, edited, rewritten and a lot of times, erased. To this I am grateful as the editions from Crow Press mirrors the poet at work, how I am allowed into the process of writing contemporary poetry and explore methods of presenting poetry through the language of the Artists´ Book.