WHEN I AM NOT THERE, a see-through archive by Laura Gardner
Shelley’s piece for the MUMA exhibition, ‘WHEN I AM NOT THERE’, is a new work made up of parts of old work. The new work is a kind of archival thing—to a certain extent, though not entirely. We were interested in doing something sympathetic to that with the book. Understanding an archive in a not-strictly-archival way. Making a new thing of it. One of the things that the materiality of the book gives us is a sense of movement through the archive.
Light travels easily through the internal pages of ‘WHEN I AM NOT THERE’. The book is printed on paper with high ‘show-through’—the visibility of printing on the reverse of a sheet of paper. The stock, notable for its uniquely low opacity, is designed by book designer Irma Boom. It has the rustle of tissue paper wrapping a recent purchase and the fine, lightweight handle of a bible paper. The book’s designers Stuart Geddes and Žiga Testen sourced the gossamer paper stock for its capacity to create unexpected moments between pages, inviting light through its fibres and layering the images and text of the book, blending them together, confusing its topography.
The lightness of the pages is a metaphor for the book’s subject: the fugitivity and ephemerality of a contemporary dance practice. The book anthologises the work of dancer and choreographer Shelley Lasica and arrived in Melbourne in August 2022, coinciding with Shelley’s performance-exhibition at MUMA. As a counterpart to the performance-exhibition, the book reflectively documents Lasica’s career and work, and can also be understood as archival.
WHEN I AM NOT THERE, a see-through archive by Laura Gardner
Shelley’s piece for the MUMA exhibition, ‘WHEN I AM NOT THERE’, is a new work made up of parts of old work. The new work is a kind of archival thing—to a certain extent, though not entirely. We were interested in doing something sympathetic to that with the book. Understanding an archive in a not-strictly-archival way. Making a new thing of it. One of the things that the materiality of the book gives us is a sense of movement through the archive.
Light travels easily through the internal pages of ‘WHEN I AM NOT THERE’. The book is printed on paper with high ‘show-through’—the visibility of printing on the reverse of a sheet of paper. The stock, notable for its uniquely low opacity, is designed by book designer Irma Boom. It has the rustle of tissue paper wrapping a recent purchase and the fine, lightweight handle of a bible paper. The book’s designers Stuart Geddes and Žiga Testen sourced the gossamer paper stock for its capacity to create unexpected moments between pages, inviting light through its fibres and layering the images and text of the book, blending them together, confusing its topography.
The lightness of the pages is a metaphor for the book’s subject: the fugitivity and ephemerality of a contemporary dance practice. The book anthologises the work of dancer and choreographer Shelley Lasica and arrived in Melbourne in August 2022, coinciding with Shelley’s performance-exhibition at MUMA. As a counterpart to the performance-exhibition, the book reflectively documents Lasica’s career and work, and can also be understood as archival.