p.33 Make Ready Peter Maybury ISBN 978 0 9566293 3 3, Gall editions, 2015
“Monochrome images of situations that offer no possibility of shelter: the uninhabitable volcanic landscape of Mount Etna, an empty well, and a woodland with mysteriously lit vapour cloud. My photographs are often incorporated as content and in this case, they are threaded through the opening visual essay in Huts ISBN: 0-907660-93-2.
Materiality is manipulated to contribute to the reading – there are seven different papers in the bookblock – but in this instance the surfaces pronounce the disparate nature of the material, gathered together as it might be to improvise shelter. Eleven artists are invited to contribute material to the book. The pages are laid out to feel non-contiguous but this is of course systematic. The intention is that the book should feel more assembled than designed. Tal R, who co-curates the show with John Hutchinson, provides a collage of found images of huts and suggests the uncanny blend of pink and brown in which they are reproduced.
The discovery of Robert Walser’s body in the snow one christmas day is described in PATMOS. An image of this, reproduced on crisp white paper, appears at the beginning of Huts.”