A Table in Ballybeg
Simon Cutts and Erica Van Horn
Coracle Press
English
Hardcover
72 pages
180 x 140 mm
2022
ISBN 9780906630631
Created by Ireland-based artists, Simon Cutts and Erica Van Horn in a very limited edition of 250 copies. Made at the time of the epidemic lockdown in all of Europe, but where life in the artists’ valley was much as it usually is, but with no visitors. Cutts and Van Horn endured almost a year of making and eating their own food, with no abatement. No cafés to visit. No tables to travel to. They live in a suspension of the past and of the imagined future, and a time when they hang up the apron, if only temporarily. Van Horn rarely writes about food, but this book contains a few interleaving texts from her journal.
(source: https://www.groundworkgallery.com/product/coracle-press-a-table-in-ballybeg)
About the Artists
Erica Van Horn is an American artist (and writer, editor, printer, bookmaker, and publisher) long transplanted to Ireland where she runs Coracle Press with her husband Simon Cutts. Her outsider’s acumen is trained on the minutiae of daily life, collecting visual and textual details of what is often overlooked or seemingly insignificant. The Book Remembers Everything: The Work of Erica Van Horn, was shown at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale in 2010, where there is an archive of her books and papers.
I Have Been Making Books Since the Day President Kennedy was Shot, an exhibition at Franklin Furnace, NYC in 1986, highlighted books she had produced up until that date. We Still Have the Telephone (2022) is her most recent title, following Living Locally (Uniformbooks), Too Raucous For a Chorus (Coracle), and By Bus (Ugly Duckling Presse).
(source: https://www.lesfugitives.com/erica-van-horn)
Simon Cutts was born in 1944, and has been making poems and objects since the mid-nineteen sixties. These have evolved through their arrangement in the physical space of rooms and pages. The form of the book as a metaphorical structure for the poem has increasingly become the form of his work, together with the installation of their parts in other settings. His work is included in several collections and libraries, including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Centre des Livres d’Artistes, Saint-Yrieix-la-Perche, France; Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven; and the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.
(source: https://www.colinsackett.co.uk/images/pdfs/spmabi.pdf)
About the Publisher
Coracle is a small publishing press directed by writer and artist Erica Van Horn and poet, artist and editor Simon Cutts. The consistent intention has been to involve artists, editors, poets and writers in the creation of an eclectic synthesis of word, image and print that could flourish in book form through exploration of metaphor, allusion, paradox and irony. It was initially started from a small farm between the hills of South Tipperary, Ireland in 1996. Mostly based in London from the 1970s, as a publisher, gallery, and a space for books, ‘workfortheeyetodo’ was the last bookshop-based project there, held in the mid-1980s. Coracle now continues more remotely as a printer-publisher, employing many of the devices and formats of hypothetical publishing inherent in the small press. Inevitably, much of the content of the publishing is of the nature of the book itself, in both critical and playful dimensions. The content almost always contains a residue of poetry, and a concern with the mechanisms of the book as a manifestation of the poem itself.
coracle.ie
(source: https://www.printedmatter.org/catalog/publisher/352)
