As I look at the website of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, I’m seeing pretty clearly that there’s a whole lot of bridges to be built between that [field/tendency/whatever] and the things I write about in my thesis.

I’ve just written nearly 60000 words challenging the centring identity of the artists’ books field, clearing space for a narrative of hybrid practice and trying to create a network of value for the hybrid practice’s affordances as well as the formal affordances of the book form and whatever artists throw at it (affect and effect)… and taking this lot inward towards the book form’s affect on the maker’s consciousness, and outwards towards whatever version of the republic of letters makes sense these days. And I’m finding a whole raft of other ways of ‘not belonging’, of ‘yet/also’ cropping up here. There are some great models for the changing face of authorship, and ways of understanding common ‘ownership’ of a field that really light up some of the tensions so markedly to be found in Book Art in a new way.

I have to go do some more reading now, and come back with some sort of primer on how I might get these ideas to shake hands.

Some of the writing for my thesis – from the chapter on the concept of ‘making-reading’ – will appear in late summer/ early autumn in The Blue Notebook.