Waves by Florian Roithmayr
Elasticity, Fracture & Flow by Rowena Hughes
click here to purchase either book
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Each artist takes a different approach to using existing printed matter to create new books. Florian Roithmayr’s Waves is a complex collage of segments compiled to reveal connections between disparate source materials. The structure of the book embodies the nature of waves themselves, repetitively dazzling and disorientating the reader. Whereas Rowena Hughes’s Elasticity, Fracture & Flow is a form of palimpsest, superimposing extracts from a scientific text to write a form of concrete poetry. Each phrase is extracted from the text on the page directly beneath, attempting to unearth the affective or aesthetic content from a supposedly objective scientific text — within even the driest most technical texts there are phrases that evoke visual, emotional or sensual experiences.
Florian Roithmayr’s book Waves is the first of a series of books tracing natural phenomena. It is a compendium bringing together texts from over two hundred writers. As in comparative literature, different voices and descriptions accumulate to form their own new narrative across science writing and literature, telling the story of how waves are imagined across different contexts and how they resonate as energy, metaphor, image or feeling.
Rowena Hughes's book was chosen for its title – Elasticity, Fracture & Flow – referring to properties of matter, qualities of language as well as states of mind. It has a motif of a twisted loop recurring in many permutations and layered with elements of drawing, a process moving backwards and forwards between the digital and analogue using an interplay of intention and chance, a creative freedom within constraints.
She has been making artist’s books for a number of years, finding old physics textbooks, removing each page and then printing or drawing on to each page before rebinding them in the original cover. This is the first time she has reproduced one of these unique books as a small edition.
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Waves by Florian Roithmayr Softcover, b/w, 128pp 120 x 165 mm Printed in an edition of 150 €15
Elasticity, Fracture & Flow by Rowena Hughes Cloth-bound, hardcover, full colour, 168pp 140 x 204 mm Printed in an edition of 150 €30
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Florian Roithmayr developed his book Waves at Daedalus Street in Athens during a research residency in 2020 supported by Arts Council England. He is currently Senior Research Fellow at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds and Associate Professor of Art at the University of Reading. Exhibitions of his work include solo presentations at Camden Arts Centre, Bloomberg space and Kettle’s Yard. His book, Aftercast, was published by Tenderbooks, London (2018), designed by Sara De Bondt Studios.
Rowena Hughes’s book works have been exhibited at Belmacz, the ICA, IMT, BreeseLittle galleries in London, Gebruder Lehmann Berlin, Arch Athens and Fotogalerie Vienna amongst others. Her sculptural work is currently on view as part of inaspettatamente (Unexpectedly) at Cloud Seven in Brussels, works from the Frédéric de Goldschmidt’s collection curated by the ghost of Alighiero Boetti.
A joint book launch and reading by Florian Roithmayr and Sophy Downes was hosted by Radio Athènes on Friday 17th December 2021
Sophy Downes is a classical archaeologist, who specialises in Achaemenid Persia. She grew up in Cambridge and now lives in Rome, where she teaches archaeology by day, writes by night, and stalks the Romantic poets whenever possible. She studied at the University of Esfahan and held a fellowship at the British Institute of Persian Studies in Tehran. Her writing has appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, Timeless Travels and Broken Sleep Books.
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