Enfolded Journeys
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Enfolded Journeys is a touring exhibition of 28 new artists’ books conceived and made in response to themes suggested by the title. Ones relating of travel,
displacement, geographies and borders, and migration in recent times and in the past as the effects of such movements of peoples, whether compelled or voluntary, may resound through the generations.
The first Modernist block of flats constructed in Britain, the Lawn Road Flats, London, were designed for, and in collaboration with Jack and Molly Pritchard by the Canadian architect Wells Coates, and completed in 1934. Jack Pritchard, in partnership with Coates, produced plywood furniture; their company, Isokon, specialised in curved moulded plywood. The Flats soon provided sanctuary for designers and teachers from pre-war Europe, including Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and László Moholy-Nagy, enabling the Bauhaus ideals of collaboration and Internationalism to continue and spread.
It was the unique creative environment of this community of émigrés at the Isokon Flats that formed a source and inspiration of our initial thinking of a historic and positive facet of immigration and exile. Each of the books in the exhibition, and the conversations generated between them, exemplify the story telling, documenting of experience and sharing characteristics of the book - a self-contained, intimate yet accessible and mobile form.
This gathering of books is shown on bespoke plywood modular display structures, easy to transport and able to be reconfigured to suit diverse sites, a design having in mind the apposite reference to the spirit of both the Isokon furniture, and building’s
unique creative environment at a time of jeopardy and uncertainty. My book, Across Time is about my immigrant parent’s journey to Israel in 1950,
My grandfather, a concentration camp survivor had emigrated from Germany to Palestine, and wanted his son and daughter-in-law to join him in the new state of Israel. And so, as refugees from Nazi Germany, my parents contemplated a fresh start in Israel.
Their journey from the UK in 1950 encompassed two ancient civilisations, Rome and Jerusalem.
My father documented this voyage through tiny cut out contact sheets in a dark grey photographic album.
But, this quest was thwarted by my mother’s desire to avoid further displacement and return to the UK, escaping Israel’s intense heat, harsh conditions and above all the swarming locusts.
These swarms could be read as a metaphor for movement and displacement.
Encased in my parent’s journey is my school project about a trip to Israel, photographs of crumbling ruins plus a visit to my grandfather.
Enfolded Journeys at The Leeds Library 18 Commercial Street, Leeds LS1 6AL
18-21 March & 31 March-4 April 2025
Curated by John McDowall and Chris Taylor
