“Signe Guttormsen explores the photographic image using rag paper. For centuries, until wood cellulose fibre was invented, paper was made out of rags – textiles that people had worn.
Flipping through the book, you run your fingers over images of rag paper from historical books that the archive staff hold up against the light. In each book, an actual piece of rag paper from the artist’s workshop is inserted.
«What the photograph and rag paper have in common is that they are self-referential at the same time as pointing out into the world. … In the process of its creation the sheet of paper is elevated to something more valuable than old clothes. Something similar happens in our relationship to the photograph. It is as if what is photographed loses something in the instant it is photographed, yet the image seems more tangible and thereby valuable than what came before it.»”
Full-colour photographs of historical examples of rag paper; these beautiful sheets often have visible chain and laid lines as well as watermarks identifying the makers, some are blank but others have writing on them, also included is a salmon pink sheet of the artist's own rag paper, text in English and Danish.
Cloth bound hard cover, 34,5 x 23 cm, 40 not numbered pages, ed/250, Copenhagen 2024
ISBN: 978-87-7603-265-4
