Bookshelf Pyre

Description:	Edition of 7. I was thinking about the books of my past and present. Those that have guided me on my journey to who I am today. And how destroying books, to see them burnt, is to deny or destroy the people who live because of and through them. The image of the pyre is also the image of the pile of books at the Friday book market on Al Mutanabbi Street. There, some books are lain out neatly, others have been piled high for rummaging. I was struck at the parallel of pyre of books and pile of books. For this work I created my own pile/pyre on a rug in my kitchen. From my bookshelf I chose books with a focus on artists, that I acquired in my teenage years and have travelled with me the past 25 years from house to house. There are recognisable images on the front of these books, from Goya, Raphael, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, William Blake among others, and I have removed any text to bring out on the bodily presence of these books. In this way the pile/pyre becomes as much ‘people’ as books. The ‘people’ became characters which as I moved the books around spoke and interacted with each other. Toulouse-Lautrec’s theatre-goer watches the proceeding through her opera glasses believing herself at a distance and in a role as an observer but really she is mingled in with the others and irrefutably part of what is happening. So a symbol for our own distant observation and self-justified non-involvement with the ‘other’.The only non-art book is a children’s text book on Iraq which I bought many years ago at the start of my involvement with the Al Mutanabbi Street project. Firstly the Iraqi woman’s face on the cover of this book was for the geographical context of this pile/pyre and has, in my eyes, also become a metaphor for the unjust and peripheral role of women in Iraq and the wider world.The pile/pyre of books on a rug in my kitchen became, for the time it existed, part of Al Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad. Its presence remains in the drypoint print ‘Bookshelf Pyre’ where the imagined flames lick around the edges, threatening but not consuming. The Al Mutanabbi Street project and the continued making of art defies the destruction wrought by people who would control our minds and hearts.
Origin:	2014
Created By:	Cartwright, Catherine
Contributor(s):	Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition
Publisher:	Kaleider Studios (Exeter, UK)
Source:	http://iuidigital.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/AMSSH/id/1027
Collection:	Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition Collection
Rights:	http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Copyright:	In Copyright
Subjects:	artists book art bookworks letterpress printing, prints

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