Marama Warren: Living a creative life

In early February I attended the ‘Artists’ books, zines and other collaborative ventures’ course at the Australasian Rare Books Summer School, hosted this year by the Mitchell Library in Sydney.

The course was led by Emeritus Professor Sasha Grishin from the Australian National University. Professor Grishin is a leading Australian art historian, art critic, and curator.

Marama Warren

Artists’ books became the main focus of the course and provided me with the highlight of the Summer School and, in fact, of my working year so far.

One of the invited speakers was New Zealand-born artist, bookmaker, and educator Marama Warren. Marama worked as a journalist and publicist in the arts before moving to New South Wales over 25 years ago.

On her website Marama writes:

“I love playing with words, images and paper, and I especially enjoy making books... My intention is to live a simple and creative life”.

Freelance writing, editing, and publishing also help pay the bills. Out of this lifestyle, has come a substantial body of work in the form of artists’ books.

You can imagine how my professional interest was piqued when the New Zealand and south Pacific elements of many of Marama’s works were revealed during her talk. This was followed not long after by acknowledgment of her New Zealand background, and ongoing connections in this country.

I soon discovered that the Alexander Turnbull Library had none of her works and, as it turned out, nor did any other New Zealand library.

This is not to say that Marama’s work is unknown – examples of her artists’ books are held in the Australian National Library, the Australian National Gallery, the State Library of Queensland (with Feral Artists group), and Wollongong University.

Her works have been exhibited in Australia, New Zealand, North America, and Japan. They have also been included in anthologies such as the beautifully illustrated 1,000 artists’ books: exploring the book by Sandra Salamony with Peter and Donna Thomas. (See on Google Books.)

A major acquisition

Following the Summer School, an agreement was negotiated with Marama to purchase 60 of her artist’s books. Two large boxes containing the works arrived in mid-May and were unpacked onto the work bench to an accompanying chorus of admiring “oohs” and “aahs” from passing colleagues.

Having all 60 books arranged on the work bench provided a unique opportunity to view the wonderful variety of Marama Warren’s work.

The books were produced between 1991 and 2015, and provide a reasonably comprehensive coverage of Marama’s artist’s book output for that period.

They demonstrate a variety of bindings such as pamphlet, Japanese, concertina, Coptic stitch, stab, and hexagonal.

They also comprise a variety of formats such as circular slot books, and albums, as well as cleverly paper-engineered circular flower folds, star and folding snake structures, and flag books.

A number of the books are unique, the rest having been made in very small production runs.

True to the concept of modern artist’s books, the unconventional formats are combined with interesting papers and miscellanea, and original textual content and imagery, to create works which express the maker’s intent or idea through their every aspect - physical and intellectual.

Bespoke boxing and specialist cataloguing

Obtaining and processing the 60 books in one acquisition event is a large undertaking. It involves, for example, hours of work for the conservation team making bespoke boxes and containers for every work, and for specialist cataloguers skilled in non-standard book cataloguing.

However, now that Marama’s work is well represented in the Library’s New Zealand & Pacific and Rare Books & Fine Printing collections, acquiring additional works will be a much simpler exercise – hopefully allowing more time for a little indulgent enjoyment of the incoming material.

Please note: This collection is currently with the conservation team and has not yet been fully catalogued. However, there are brief records for all of the works on the library’s online catalogue. They can be located by searching the catalogue for “Marama Warren”.

Zines

Although the Alexander Turnbull Library collects artists’ books created by New Zealanders, it was the zine element of the course title which initially caught my eye.

Zines are a new and developing collecting area in the Library’s New Zealand & Pacific Collection.

They are difficult to acquire using standard acquisition processes due to the alternative or counter-culture nature of their publication and distribution, and often even trickier to catalogue satisfactorily once we have them.

Donations of zines are welcome. The Alexander Turnbull Library is interested in acquiring zines by New Zealand zinesters, or zines containing New Zealand or south Pacific-related content. If you’re interested in donating, drop us a line at atl@dia.govt.nz or see our info about it.

Zine publishers working in New Zealand should remember that zines are covered by Legal Deposit and copies should therefore be deposited with the Library when they're published. If you have any questions about whether the zine you have produced should be deposited with us, email legaldeposit@dia.govt.nz or phone 04 474 3104.

New Zealand-born Australian artists

Professor Grishin, by the way, estimated that about one quarter of practising Australian artists are New Zealand-born – which indicates that there are likely to be other expat New Zealanders in Australia whose published output is in scope for the Library’s collections.

Find more artists’ books

The Alexander Turnbull Library has many examples of artists’ books. You can find them using the National Library online catalogue and searching for keywords like handmade, the genre term Artists' books, and subject headings such as Wooden bindings or Fine Books—New Zealand—Auckland—Specimens.