My name is Andrew Eason.
My website is primarily about my artwork involving artists’ books, and I will let them speak for themselves (though most of my books featured in the galleries include a short introductory text or statement). However, my interests extend beyond the artworks themselves into the libraries that collect them and their effects on the way artists and readers alike are affected by them.
I’m interested in the opportunities and challenges they present as opportunities to read differently, to look differently, to think differently; to be different, especially when one is involved in creative or research endeavours. I’m intrigued by notions of how different tools for thought, different analogies for the world and different means and modes of expression can help us think and imagine in different ways. This could range from pretty deep psychological impacts of being able to think abstractly through the dawn of symbolic registers, through the pathetic identification we feel with fictive characters, or it could be more subtle, allowing us the opportunity to sidestep into different ideas of who we ourselves are ‘as’ readers, ‘as’ poets, ‘as’ artists, etc. There are challenges, too, in the very strangeness of artists’ books, a call to attention that can disrupt our sense of settled order and provoke interest and intrigue. (Which is why I am interested in their impact on information literacy).
There’s a wealth of rabbit holes to go down with this area of interest! But I feel that it has impacts in how our developing digital creativity is influenced by older models, and in carrying forward understanding of what it is that persists in new mediations of our creative selves.
I’ve researched on topics around these areas for my 2010 PhD ‘Becoming What the Book Makes Possible‘, and my 2012 Library and Information Management MSc ‘Artists’ Books in Libraries as Sites of Critical Reflection‘. I continue to work with libraries as well as making my own work, and recently began work as a research consultant for SWRLS, the South Western Regional Library Services consortium. When I have capacity for further study, I intend to pursue CILIP chartership and I would ultimately love to work with collections of artists’ books to curate and promote them to library audiences and beyond.
I hope you’ll enjoy looking through my website, and some of the writing on this blog: a lot of it is just me thinking aloud, having fun with ideas, recording and reflecting on visual experimentation and work, and trying to settle new reading and new ideas into the background of my other interests and connections. Most of it is just for fun, so please excuse the more outlandish or unlikely connections, ramblings and awkwardness.
Thanks for stopping by.
Andrew Eason.