Celebrating Townsville Exhibition - The Artists

With this series of three sculptural works titled Fold Liturgy, Kinlyside has taken many of the components of a framed artwork (even the wire from the back used to hang the frame) and refashioned them into a kind of bookish hybrid; something else entirely between a book and a wall work. The new hybrid work can neither be placed on a wall nor opened up like a book but still retains the compact, portable and sequential elements of a book. In this series of works the artist is objecting to people’s intent of tearing pages out of a book to make a financial profit.

The artist made the contents of the boxes very special so that the viewer would be able to understand her objection. The pages used were torn from an important book, the Bible, reportedly the world’s best-selling and most widely distributed book. The three works Fold Liturgy I, II and III contain pages torn from three different bibles.

The pages in each of the Fold Liturgy works are not flat like a printed image might be if it is placed in a frame on a wall, but are folded which makes the words more difficult, if not impossible, to read. This refers to the destructive nature of the act of tearing pages from books and making the image and text information redundant in the process.

The wires fixed inside the base of each container function to make the pages stay in place creating the look of the “cathedral windows”. The wire words themselves are nonsensical but are echoes of Biblical words that have escaped from the pages. These words are meaningless now because they are read out of context.

The base of each work is made to look like a rusted container to emulate the frame of an old painting. This is also intended to make each work look aged, as a religious icon might be, and therefore more authentic and valid. The decorative motif on the front of each base adds to that impression.   

ARTIST STATEMENT

Kinlyside has stated, “some-times printed words and images or a combination of both are removed from books, framed and placed on a wall. Then, as an artwork (hanging on a wall), it has a value both in terms of price and as a décor item. If the very same image or text is left as a folded piece of paper bound into the original book, its value is much less. As a printmaker and maker of books it concerns me that someone could buy an artist’s book that has within its pages, say…6 etchings, then could tear out the image pages and make 6 framed artworks for purely commercial reasons”.