Folded Eggs
Bruce Connew
Vapour Momenta Books
English
Soft cover, with Kraft paper jacket
Edition of 600
100 pages
130 x 200 mm
2018
ISBN 9780473437701
Folded eggs was published in 2018. The book emerged from an unexpected journey taken by artist Bruce Connew, traveling from his home in New Zealand to visit his grandchildren in Santiago. What began as a personal project—capturing images without a specific intention—grew into a deeper reflection on the history of Chile, a country whose recent past Connew had come to understand more through his travels. As the project unfolded, Connew’s own country’s colonial history became implicated, prompting a broader meditation on the shared legacies of colonialism in both Chile and New Zealand.
Folded eggs is a modest meditation on history and memory, featuring 53 color images taken across Chile, from Valparaíso to Santiago. Alongside these images is a concise essay that reflects on the political histories of Allende, Pinochet, and New Zealand’s colonial wars.
The book is a tactile, softback artist’s edition, printed on high-quality German paper, with a wrap-around Kraft-paper cover printed using Risograph—a process that complements the raw, simple nature of the work. The essay runs as a single line of text beneath the images and is centered across the pages, neither beginning at the start nor finishing at the end. This design creates a fluid relationship between image and text, offering a reading experience that is both filmic and poetic.
About the artist
Bruce Connew is an acclaimed Auckland-based artist and photographer whose work can be found in both public galleries and private collections across the New Zealand.
Other than a brief interlude at Guildford School of Art, Connew is entirely self-taught and examines a breadth of subjects from the wryly prosaic to the chillingly confrontational. His images speak to the tension that often underlies narratives defined by dual perspectives, and convey such narratives with striking depth and complexity. While photography is his primary medium, Connew’s work resists easy categorisation.
bruceconnew.com
(source: https://suite.co.nz/artists/bruce-connew/)
About the publisher
Vapour Momenta Books is the pocket-sized publishing arm of Aotearoa New Zealand artists Bruce Connew and Catherine Griffiths.
vapourmomentabooks
(source: https://tsundoku.ie/art-book-fair-2023/vapour-momenta-books/)