It is so green outside it is difficult to leave the window
Shelagh Wakely
Coracle
English
Softcover, uncut pages
128 x 180 mm
48 pages
1980
ISBN Not Applicable
*This artists’ book was kindly donated to the collection by Simon Cutts and Erica Van Horn of Coracle press in August 2022.*
This artists’ book collects together a series of black and white photographs of an outdoor garden documenting the transformations taking place ‘from Spring 1974 to Spring 1979’ with an accompanying text by the artist. This is a rare example of sculptor and installation artist Wakely’s writing and book work. Many themes of the artist’s approach to installation are foregrounded here with close attention to the dynamics between domestic objects and their environment.
(source: https://www.richardsaltoun.com/publications/44-shelagh-wakely-it-is-so-green-outside-it-is-difficult/)
About the Artist
Shelagh Wakely (1932 – 2011) was a British sculptor and experimental artist. She was born in Madingley, Cambridgeshire in 1932. She studied painting and screen-printing at the at the Chelsea College of Art in the late 1950s. She also studied at the Royal College of Art. She began her career as a textile designer. Her work is included in the collections of the Tate Museum and the British Council.
(source: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/shelagh-wakely-14825)
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)
