Q: How would you describe your practice?
ND: I would say the major part of my practice involves making books...well, more accurately, it involves both making and ‘unmaking’ them. Some of my smaller books, such as “The Book Which Reads Itself”, I make from scratch and as editions; but I’m also interested in taking existing, mass produced books and making them unique.
Q: Why books?
ND: I love books. When I first went to university it was to study English, but I realised I’d made a mistake and went and did art instead. Studying art made me realise that what I love about books is not just the text within them, but the whole shebang: the cover, the shape, the overall concept and design, even the smell. If I could bottle ‘The Smell of Books’, I would.
Q: A lot of your work looks like it’s incredibly time-consuming to create...
ND: It is! “Ten Years”, in which I coloured in the chips on a 10 metre roll of woodchip wallpaper took months to complete; but it was “A Secret Heliotropism” which was a real labour of love. That piece took over a year to finish because I had to use a very small pair of scissors to cut each of the 320 pages.
Q: What is “A Secret Heliotropism” about?
ND: Well the title is a quote from Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History”. To
paraphrase, he said that our understanding of history is a bit like the way plants follow the sun round the sky (heliotropism). In other words, depending on when we exist, our understanding of historical events changes accordingly - for example, we don’t understand the events of 1066 in the same way as people who were there at the time, or there the generation after and so on.
With all this in mind, I took a 20th century history book (Benjamin was a 20th century philosopher) and turned each page into a strand of leaves. When the book is displayed, the leaves are stretched out to the nearest source of sunlight, so the book changes its appearance depending on where it’s shown.
Q: This interest in history also crops up in “Telling the Truth About History, But Not About the Past”...
ND: It does. All of my work is about time - I’m obsessed with the idea. If it’s not about “History” and “official” time, then it’s about what we do with time, how we fill it. That’s why so much of my work is time-consuming. I love making works which take ages to create, partly because making them gives me the opportunity to think about my favourite subject.
Q: But don’t you get bored? The processes you undertake seem pretty repetitive...
ND: No, I don’t get bored because I’m thinking whilst working. I sometimes get frustrated because I want to get to the end result, but, in the end, I tell myself to be patient... There would be something deeply unsatisfying about a work that I knocked out quickly. The long process of making an individual work is also important in terms of its successor: my next piece of work is usually sparked off by the one I’m making at the time, so I need the thinking time to work out future plans.
Nicola Dale can be contacted via www.axisweb.org/artist/nicoladale
