Strange pages: Investigating artists' books with Dr Caren Florance

Overview

Join Dr Caren Florance as she presents a lecture on her 2024 National Library Fellowship research into artists' books (books made by artists as art), how the National Library came to collect them, what problems arose with cataloguing them, and how they inspired a broad, vibrant collection of Australian artists' books that continues to grow.

Dr Caren Florance is a 2024 National Library of Australia Honorary Fellow.

The National Library has a fabulous collection of artists' books, or books made by artists as art. In the 1980s the Library collected a small group of books made by staff and students of the Canberra School of Art's Graphic Investigation Workshop (GIW). Run by Czech artist Petr Herel and populated by a constellation of local and international artists, the GIW was ostensibly a drawing workshop that treated the notion of 'drawing' as a philosophical construct rather than a defined process.

Dr Caren Florance is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Canberra's Centre for Creative and Cultural Research. She is also a maker of artists books, often in collaboration with writers and other artists.