It has taken well over two years, but finally the archive of the Place Identity Memory exhibition has been installed in its permanent home in the Crichton Campus Library.PLACE IDENTITY MEMORY, the first exhibition curated by Iris group, opened at Gracefield Arts Centre in May 2009, and toured across the region until October 2009. 70 international artists were selected, showing around 200 bookworks.
THE ARCHIVE represents 72 books from the exhibition, generously donated by the artists as a permanent collection.
The archive is now installed in the main body of the Crichton Campus Library, in a new dedicated display cabinet kindly donated by Bibliographic Data Services. The cabinet has room for a changing display of around half the collection, the rest being stored in the locked base. We will change the display on a regular basis, and are arranging for full hands-on access for students and researchers, as well as digitising the catalogue. The whole collection will also be available for touring.
We hope that future Iris exhibitions will develop their own archive, housed each in their own separate cabinet and forming an exhibition in their own right.
Meanwhile, Iris continues its next curatorial venture, a collaborative book of Magic Power Presence, to be published in the autumn, and which will hopefully lead to another major exhibition event on the same theme.
IRIS is a group of professional artists, first formed in 2007, specifically to develop awareness of artists' books in Scotland and to make Dumfries and Galloway a recognised centre for the art form.
Fantastic! Well done to all at IRIS - the show in the old building at Gracefield was one of the best things I can remember seeing there.
ReplyDeleteAlso great to see how artists are building direct relationships with the Universities at the Crichton....little by little hopefully we can build cultural bridges that make the campus a little less isolated up its hill.