Pictures and page numbers - image, text and formal structure in the visual book and the artist's book

Within the realm of artists' book works there are few that could not be said to display a fundamental concern with the physicality of the book. The mechanics of page turning are integrally implied in any artist's decision to utilise the book form. Indeed, artists' books emphasise the ability of book forms, and of text and language, to acquire meaning through form and structure alone.The physical and conceptual mechanics, or syntax, of the book - whose basis lies as much in the formal, functional dictates of the book's material characteristics, as in centuries of entrenched tradition in page layout and book design - affords a spatial, sculptural and temporal framework whose manipulation may be effortlessly and subconsciously 'read' by the viewer, according to their inherent understanding and appreciation of the form's conceptual function and operation. But while the structural connotations of the book suggest that special kind of decipherment known as 'reading', the broader associations of the book's mythic, iconic and historic symbolism may be equally unavoidable.The book works comprising the research that this paper accompanies therefore aim, on the one hand, to explore the formal, structural physicality and spatiality of the book as both a self-contained sculptural platform and as a particular sort of collection, or series, of visual imagery, while on the other hand, seeking to address the psychological form of the book as an iconic, symbolic object, and to simulate something of the character of the unique, precious and mythic books of the past. Thus it has been an attempt to deal with abstract notions of pattern and structure, as well as with the mental frameworks of association and connotation surrounding the visual modes adopted to represent these structures.The project presents an integrated and interrelated series of unique, hand-made book works that are about books - or perhaps a particular kind of 'bookishness' - a collection which aims to be physically very real, but at the same time completely mythical, and in whose volumes the common conceptual and aesthetic reference is the inherent, traditional austerity of the book page, and the simultaneous conceptual movement and structural dynamics of the mechanical book form