Book 53.  Reacting to Renee (Omnibus). Leslie, R and Penn C.  (2009) (Fig. 52).  Reacting to Renee (Omnibus). Unique collaborative  artist’s book. Drawing, digital prints, text, sewing, collage. 16 pages.   27cm x 26cm x 3.5cm.  3.5cm. Book 53. Collection:  Cheryl Penn.

When Leslie agreed to work with me, I gave her twenty three landscape images which related to the ‘newness’ of the land at creation progressing through to the transformation of the earth into cities, factory sites and wastelands.  Leslie could not respond to the work and she returned it to me with an apology and a set of drawings very similar to the images in   Reacting to Renee I (Book 51).   As I  had given my landscape drawings to her to work with, I felt they should still form a part of whatever books we produced.  The result was that I used my drawings as the binding for the pages she had given me.

This also alleviated the fact that the right hand side was thicker than the left where, as with  Book 51,  I had sewed pockets into which I inserted a narrative printed onto a card.  The narrative has to do with X who continually finds himself in strange places, amongst strange people,  whilst having no idea how he got there.  The travels of X are all my own dream travels.  I have referred to ‘Omnibus’ in the titles as this book is in fact three stories in one; the people which inhabit Leslie’s drawings, the visual narrative of the landscape and the journeys of X into the dream landscape.

The interaction by the viewer, by having to take the cards out and reading them is intended to mirror  the movement of X through the landscapes and people he comes into contact with.  X is represented as a wooden cut-out, alien to the places he comes to visit, or even the book in which he now resides.