World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
CLOSED FOR SUMMER.
RE-OPENING 01.02.24
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
Art
Theory / Essay
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Fiction / Poetry
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Curatorial
Group Shows / Collections
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Out-of-print / Rare
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Signed Books
World Food Books Gift Voucher
World Food Book Bag
Australian Art
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Minimal Art
Dada
'Pataphysics / Oulipo
Fluxus
Concrete Poetry
Pop Art
Surrealism
Arte Povera
Arte Informale / Haute Pâte / Tachism
Nouveau Réalisme / Zero / Kinetic
Situationism / Lettrism
Collage / Mail Art / Xerox Art
Art Brut / Folk / Visionary / Fantastic
Illustration / Graphic Art / Bandes Dessinées
Furniture
Italian Radical Design / Postmodernism
Textiles
Ceramics / Glass
Counterculture
Protest / Revolt
Anarchism
Socialism / Communism / Capitalism
Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language
Feminism
Fetishism / BDSM
Drugs / Psychedelia
Crime / Violence
Animal Rights / Veganism
Occult / Esoterica
Ecology / Earth / Alternative Living
Whole Earth / Crafts
All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
2024, English
Softcover (saddle stiched w. dust jacket in glassine sleeve), 28 pages, 15.2 x 28 cm
Published by
no more poetry / Naarm
$35.00 - In stock -
no more poetry presents nmp.19
Hobbyist
the debut books of artworks by Cosi
Kill ! kill ! let there be fresh meat…
— W. Carlos Williams Spring and All
"In the lingering impression, or, print one might be urged to place their finger on the pure substance of an uninhibited adult imagination — to which the writer rejects — obviously, such imagination is deeply habitual, rendered in ink & pencil, in The Knowledge of a practice so innate, or rich, that to disinherit from the author, or the author from it, would represent an absolute undoing, a total annihilation of an apparatus, so far from rudimentary, that it becomes simply (or quite complexly) the image of an entire self. this collection of some twenty-eight artworks, being automatic, incongruent — graphite, charcoal, ink — rigid, finite and complete — convey an underestimated and complex sense of play, by which the author — simply Cosi (as if distilling the self in a single word could be conceived as simple) — becomes a diagrammatic example of a brilliant and full-cream adult, so disinterested in the conformity of adulthood that more difficulty is placed within the absurd notion itself. a self professed Ideas Guy, Cosi shows us the fantastic spaces that so often fight against the drab mundanity of adult existence, illuminating it so justly that it is impossible not to be absorbed by the light, in this way, these drawings are a love story, not only to the author herself, but also to the de-husked onlooker (you). in this congress, this made up thing, that we have accumulated, and labelled: a life, there are rules which can be reduced to a fine coating, and that, like in our homes, we need not clean, but rather, let gather. thrust open your windows to whatever world surrounds you, fill the minimal prison with particles of life! forget banality…they will not build park benches in your name, you mustn't want that, you: sweet reader deserve a life worth living, and here, in this collection, you are offered the exact guide."—Joshua Edward, editor nmp, on nmp.19 Hobbyist by Cosi.
2024, English
Softcover, 776 pages, 24 x 17 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
KW Institute for Contemporary Art / Berlin
$65.00 - In stock -
“A sense of art history is part of the critical basis on which artists construct ‘a future’ of art. But the question is, which sense of art history will be shaping that future? Art history has always been far too important to be left up to art historians.”—Ian Burn, 1982
Ian Burn has been described as many things: an activist, a trade-unionist, a journalist, an art critic, a curator and an art historian—and, as he once described himself in a moment of self-deprecating alienation, ‘an exConceptual artist’.
Edited by Burn’s friend, frequent collaborator and eminent art historian, Dr Ann Stephen, this volume brings together 49 pieces of Burn’s own agile and expansive writings that reveals a probing, analytical artist who turned to language to articulate the need for ‘looking at seeing and reading’, who pursued a Marxist politics in the face of neoliberalism and who sought to occupy and transform the margins of landscape painting. Alongside a vast collection of his artworks, the catalogue brings together previously unpublished material and offers a prescient rethinking of art in a decentered world through what Ian Burn called ‘peripheral vision’. The collection concludes with reflections on Burn’s life and work from prominent figures and past collaborators in the form of memorial lectures.
Born in Geelong in 1939, Ian Burn was a conceptual artist. Burn studied painting in Melbourne and went on to live and work in London and New York. Burn moved back to Australia in 1977 and passed away in 1993 at the age of 53.
Ian Burn has been described as many things: an activist, a trade-unionist, a journalist, an art critic, a curator and an art historian—or, as he once described himself in a moment of self-deprecating alienation, ‘an ex-conceptual artist’.
Born in Geelong in 1939, Burn studied painting in Melbourne and went on to live and work in London and New York. Burn moved back to Australia in 1977 and passed away in 1993 at the age of 53.
Burn sought to grapple with how art history intersects and engages with contemporary art and political debate, arguing for a decentred view of the world. His legacy is international and can be seen in retrospective exhibitions as recent as 2022, and his work remains a key touchstone in art history.
Edited by Burn’s friend, frequent collaborator and eminent art historian, Dr Ann Stephen, this volume brings together 49 pieces of Burn’s own agile and expansive writings alongside a vast collection of his artworks. The collection concludes with reflections on Burn’s life and work from prominent figures and past collaborators in the form of memorial lectures.
Design and typesetting by Robert Milne.
Co-published by Walther Koenig and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.
2024, English
Softcover (w. hand painted spine strip, ink on Japanese kozo paper), 470 pages, 27.8 x 20.6 cm
Ed. of 50 signed and numbered by the artist,
Published by
Tutto / Naarm—Melbourne
$180.00 - In stock -
André Piguet (b.1986) is influenced by an ever expanding field of interests; perhaps most simply filed under “WORLD”. He has a long held interest in making books.
For nearly two decades in the late 19th Century, the Swiss filigranologist, Charles-Moïse Briquet systematically visited 235 paper archives and manuscript collections, as well as libraries for about a thousand printed items. He examined 30,840 volumes, as well as 1,432 documents in unbound form, from which he made a total of 44,000 tracings and recorded 65,000 references to the same. This Herculean feat of historical scholarship culminated in the publication of Briquet’s four volume encyclopedia of European paper watermarks, LES FILIGRANES (1907).
A watermark is a small image that appears in paper when held up to light source. In a method dating back to the 12th Century, these designs were bent out of thin strands of copper wire and sewn into a wire paper mould, supported by a wooden frame.
Ranging from the chaos, ferocity and social disruption of the 13th Century to the rise of humanism and clarity of the high renaissance, these images offer a small window into a Europe caught between ancient and modern; of a world where the mundane and mystic still co-existed.
SELECTED WATERMARKS 1282 – 1600 is a condensed 470 page bootleg photocopy edit of Briquet's 1907 publication. Eschewing any formal design or sequencing and stripping the source material to its bare formal elements, Piguet’s book is both an exercise in graphic deconstruction and an exploration into the possibilities and constraints of the photocopier.
Softcover with hand painted spine strip, ink on Japanese kozo paper, cold glue bound. edition of 50 Signed and numbered by the artist. All spine wraps are unique.
These books are entirely made by hand using archival materials.
Founded in 2020, TUTTO is an independent publisher based in Naarm / Melbourne, Australia with a focus on making artist books.
1992, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 10 pages, 21 x 14.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Store 5 / Melbourne
$45.00 - In stock -
John Nixon catalogue for an exhibition at Store 5, Melbourne, 1992. Includes a black monochrome, selection of Nixon's texts, along with texts on Nixon by László Réber and John Barlycorn.
John Nixon (1949-2020) was a seminal figure in contemporary Australian abstraction. Since 1968 his work has been dedicated to the ongoing experimentation, analysis and development of radical modernism, minimalism, the monochrome, constructivism, non-objective art and the readymade – key reference points in his work. Experimental Painting Workshop (EPW), which began in 1978, forms the basis of Nixon’s rigorous and long-standing intellectual investigation into the making of art, over time expanding to encompass not only painting, but collage, photography, video, dance and experimental music performance.
As New.
1985, English / German
Softcover, 96 pages, 26 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Daadgalerie / Berlin
$45.00 - Out of stock
Excellent catalogue published on the occasion of an exhibition of Five Australian artists exhibiting at Daadgalerie, Berlin, Sep 2—Oct 6, 1985, organised by René Block with Mike Parr. Extensive and heavily illustrated chapters on each artist, Richard Dunn, John Lethbridge, Mike Parr, Peter Tyndall, and Ken Unsworth, alongside illustrated texts by curators René Block and Anthony Bond, and independent artist texts by George Alexander, Bernice Murphy, John Barbour, and more, in both English and German. Installation photographs and all works in colour and b/w, plus biographies, and much more. Catalogue by René Block.
Very Good copy, light wear.
2023, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 224 pages, 29 x 29 cm
Published by
George Schwarz and Charis / East Sydney
$190.00 - In stock -
Powerful Paradise the Art of George Schwarz and Charis is an artists book, a collaboration between George Schwarz, his partner Charis, Linda Dement and Craig Judd. It is an introduction to a wonderful life and to beautiful, complex and intriguing art. Ernest Georg Schwarz and Charis Elizabeth McKittrick enjoy a unique partnership beginning 1964. The word collaborators in this case is an inadequate descriptor. In their presence one is witness to but a force of nature, a swirling vortex of creative mutuality. Simultaneously lovers, artists, apiarists, activists, authors, film and wine makers, 'Powerful Paradise' is a celebration and a legacy.
This extremely limited hardcover edition is the first survey of the couple's life in art, the last survivors of bohemian Kings Cross. Creators of the first Australian hardcore sex films to be passed by the censors (and also refused classification), George and Charis were ahead of the curve in every aspect of their practice. This volume features the only writing covering their film output, extensive photographic work and global travels. Simultaneously erotic, taboo, progressive, liberated; lives dedicated to their work and one another and perhaps too provocative/evocative for the Australian art establishment.
1975, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 28 x 21.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
YWCA Australia / Melbourne
$290.00 - Out of stock
Very scarce first and only edition of one of the great Australian photo-books of the 1970s. Woman 1975 was published as "a permanent record of the exhibition of photographs entitled Woman, which was the contribution made towards International Women's year, 1975, by the Young Women's Christian Association of Australia." A gorgeous and moving overview of womanhood in Australia in the 1970s through the images of countless Australian photographers of the period, including Carol Jerrems, Rennie Ellis, John Williams, Fiona Hall, Melanie Le Guay, Ingeborg Tyssen, Jacqueline Mitelman, Les Gray, Grace Lock, Reg Morrison, Phillip Quirk, Peter Tyndall, Howard Birnstihl, Juergen Hasenkopf, Richard Crawley and many more.
Very Good copy.
2023, English
Softcover, 189 pages, 28 x 20.5 cm
Ed. of 700,
Published by
The Manhattan Art Journal / New York
$55.00 - Out of stock
The long-awaited premiere issue of The Manhattan Art Journal, the printed edition of The Manhattan Art Review. Edited by Sean Tatol and designed by Becca Abbe, Vol. 1, Issue 1 features writings, letters, interviews, reviews, The Melbourne Art Review, comics, and literary quotes, with contributions by Jessica Almereyda, Anthony Atlas, Brian Block, Chris Camperchioli, Noah Dillon, Marguerite Duras, Michael Eby, Andy Giannakakis, Laszlo Horvath, Ella Howells, Cameron Hurst, Domenic Hutchins, Carmen-Sibha Keiso, Bill Kemmler, Eydís Klej, Adam Lehrer, Mathieu Malouf, Marc Matchak, Lucas Matheson, Christian Oldham Tannon Reckling, Libby Rothfeld, Jake S., Audrey Schmidt, Sophy Schulman, Mitzi Sfarzada, Myles Starr, Sean Tatol, Dylan Taylor, Luka Usmiani, Adrian Wilson, and Jarrod Zlatic, interviews by Ryan Cullen, Famous Art Guy, Carmen-Sibha Keiso, and Ross Simonini, and comics by Andrew Newell Walther.
Edition of 700 copies.
2024, English
Softcover, 145 pages, 21 x 29.8 cm
Published by
Neon Parc / Melbourne
Discipline / Melbourne
$30.00 - Out of stock
This luminous volume on artist Elizabeth Newman includes two essays by Francis Plagne, each of which cover different, crucial time-periods of Newman’s practice. Highly illustrated, the beautiful works collected here range from the very recent, to those created in the last ten years or so. Melbourne-based Newman uses painting, printmaking, installation and found objects to explore, interrogate and apprehend questions that revolve around the philosophical and social conditions of art.
Co-published by Neon Parc and Discipline, Elizabeth Newman: Still makin’ history.... is the sister volume to Elizabeth Newman: Drawings.
2024, English
Softcover, 145 pages, 21 x 29.8 cm
Published by
Neon Parc / Melbourne
Discipline / Melbourne
$30.00 - Out of stock
This beautiful volume traces the links between Elizabeth Newman’s drawing practice and wider oeuvre. As Erik Jensen writes in his accompanying essay "her drawings are stubborn and deliberate and curious and patient" – they are acts of discovery that are, as Newman says, about "going to the nothing... to what is most me". Often radiant with colour, much of the work here is strikingly immediate, playful, visceral. Also includes an interview between Helen Hughes, Francis Plagne and Newman.
Co-published by Neon Parc and Discipline, Elizabeth Newman: Drawings is the sister volume to Elizabeth Newman: Still makin’ history....Melbourne-based artist Elizabeth Newman uses painting, printmaking, installation and found objects to explore, interrogate and apprehend questions that revolve around the philosophical and social conditions of art.
2021, English
Softcover (w. plastic dust jacket), 72 pages, 21 x 30 cm
Published by
Drill Hall Gallery / Canberra
$35.00 - In stock -
Catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition Un-titled: Elizabeth Newman at Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra, 20 November, 2021—23 January, 2022. The exhibition surveyed Newman’s body of work, ranging from collage, installation, text-based, textile or found object, and all infused with painterly notions of re-presentation. Hovering around the edges of signification, embracing affect and the act of becoming, her work pivots around reversals of positive and negative, challenging the limitations of language while paradoxically affirming the plasticity of our systems of understanding. Profusely illustrated throughout with essays by Tony Oates and Frances Plagne. Designed by Small Tasks.
2012, English
Hardcvoer (clothbound), 72 pages, 27 x 21 cm
Published by
M.33 / Melbourne
$55.00 - In stock -
Leading Australian photo-artist Jane Burton's Other Stories captures her arcane sense of mood and atmosphere to stunning effect. Other Stories is a collection of photographs that are intended to be experienced as a series of loose associations rather than determined narratives. Structured with five chapters like a fairy-tale collection, each series is toned in a different colour – reminiscent of old photographic processes and hand-colouring techniques. The atmosphere common to all the stories is cinematic and dreamlike. Saturated with colour (peach-sepia, red, viridian green, lavender, and blue), each has its own emotional pitch and temperature; the ‘story’ is non-linear, non-literal, falling instead between remembrance, hallucination, and fantasy.
Whether depicting a figure, landscape, interior, or object, the photographs are imbued with a weight of meaning and emotional intensity. The landscapes are rendered as symbolic and psychological – places imagined, felt, remembered, rather than actual or specific. The female figure depicted, a character that moves through the stories, an animating presence, more ghost than definitive persona.
Text by Ingrid Perez.
2023, English
Softcover, 184 pages, 29.5 x 22 cm
Published by
Perimeter Editions / Melbourne
MUMA / Victoria
UNSW Press / Sydney
$55.00 - In stock -
Many species, besides us humans, have developed a notion of love; that absolute beast of biology – love – has filled our brains with delight and sorrow and it has become our most inspirational addition to the line of consciousness. Love is so diverse, complex and complicated to us that it functions more like the air in the array of a storm than a simplistic cause-and-effect response. – Paul Knight
Paul Knight: L’ombre de ton ombre is the first monograph dedicated to Australian-born and Berlin-based artist Paul Knight, co-published by Monash University Museum of Art | MUMA, Melbourne, UNSW Galleries, Sydney, and Perimeter Editions. The publication accompanies his first survey exhibition, co-commissioned by MUMA and UNSW Galleries.
For more than two decades, Knight has taken intimacy as his subject, considering its relationship to representation and the social designs that underpin its expression. This has led him, via an interest in science, to the potential role that intimacy plays in consciousness as an evolutionary line. Knight’s ongoing photographic project, Chamber Music, records the life he shares with his partner Peter. Since their meeting in 2009, the series has accumulated hundreds of glimpses into the domestic space of their relationship, with its images created through varying degrees of pre-meditation and chance; often the camera timer is set so that it simply captures what it sees. The photographs test the ability of this machine – the camera – and the prints it produces to capture and contain intimacy. The images hold human love, which Knight proposes might be our only positive legacy in a future in which machine intelligence carries on, bearing the mark of its creators, beyond humanity itself.
Paul Knight: L’ombre de ton ombre features an extensive selection of photographs from Chamber Music and details the algorithmic working methods of the textile and machine learning works that Knight has developed for the exhibition. It brings artistic and scientific perspectives into conversation with his evolving practice, inviting contributions from: Professor of Contemporary Art History at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, Anthony Gardner, who situates Knight’s practice within histories of contemporary art and of queer visibility; theoretical astrophysicist and Hawking Chair in Cosmology and Science Communication at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Ontario, Dr Katie Mack, who responds with a poetic evocation of the cosmic timescales that underpin Knight’s thinking; and philosopher Oxana Timofeeva, who reflects on machine learning in the context of human consciousness. The publication will be launched at the exhibition opening at MUMA on 7 October 2023.
MUMA (Melbourne) x UNSW Galleries (Sydney) x Perimeter Editions (Melbourne).
2023, English
Softcover, 136 pages, 10.8 x 17.6 cm
Published by
Common Room / Naarm
$25.00 - Out of stock
The first in a co-published series with Melbourne School for Discontent, the three longform essays in this book examine various under-known histories of so-called Australia from Aboriginal perspectives, drawing from colonial archives, extensive study and lived experience to examine the ongoing legacy of colonial policy and legislation, from the early 1800s through to Native Title and into the twenty-first century.
2023, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 110 pages, 25 x 17 cm
Published by
ACCA / Melbourne
$25.00 - In stock -
Produced in association with the upcoming ACCA exhibition of the same name, this publication casts a lens upon feminist, queer, and non-binary subjectivities to consider the transgressive pleasures and liberations of horror, as makers, masters and consumers of the genre.
From the other side features curatorial texts by Elyse Goldfinch and Jessica Clark, alongside writings from Barbara Creed, author of The Monstrous Feminine; Canadian film writer Kier-La Janisse, author of the cult classic, House of Psychotic Women, 2012; Lisa Fuller, a Murri woman and author of the novel Ghost Bird, 2021; and a horror-themed screenplay by UK-based author and filmmaker Alison Peirse, editor of the Women Make Horror anthology, 2021.
Artists featured in the exhibition and book include Clare Milledge, Cybele Cox, Heather B Swann, Jemima Lucas, Julia Robinson, Karla Dickens, Kellie Wells, Lonnie Hutchinson, Louise Bourgeois, Maria Kozic, Marianna Simnett, Mia Boe, Minyoung Kim, Naomi Blacklock, Naomi Kantjuriny, SJ Norman, Suzan Pitt, Tracey Moffatt and Zamara Zamara.
The exhibition crosses the artificial parameters of horror in the everyday, as something that exists as part of society but also from outside of it. Culminating in a potent synthesis of dread, camp, humour and catharsis, From the other side challenges the traditional narratives and assumed boundaries of the body, gender, the self and the ‘other’.
1979, English
Softcover, 174 pages, 20.5 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Dolceamore Publishing / Carlton
$50.00 - In stock -
Rare copy of Australian performance artist Lin Van Hek's first 1979 collection of writings and short stories, The Slain Lamb Stories, published independently by Dolceamore Publishing in Carlton. Ten stories accompanied by photographs by photographer Jacqueline Mitelman and film-maker Monique Schwarz.
"Her precise bold style does not compromise. Her collaboration between reality and fantasy possess the bracing clarity of the woman who both involved and informed, stands alone."—Reina Nervi Underground, Writers Guild Germany
Lin Van Hek (aka Lyn van Hecke, Linn Van Hek, born Lyn Whitehead) is an Australian writer, singer, painter, designer and performance artist. Born in Melbourne, Van Hek lived in India (working in hospitals) and Belgium, studied painting in France, writing and performing there until the early 1970s when she returned to Australia. She was a vice-president of the Society of Women Writers and co-founder of the literary-music group Difficult Women, that began with a series of feminist literary salons van Hek held in the 1980s. Van Hek has acted in films, including the 1987 thriller "With Time to Kill", and with Joe Dolce, wrote and sang the song 'Intimacy' in the 1984 film The Terminator. Van Hek was also the lead singer with the 1980s electro-dance band Skin the Wig. The Lilian character in Helen Garner's Monkey Grip is said to be based on Van Hek. Lin is also a respected fashion designer, with her own label, Lin Van Hek Design, working in collaboration with women entrepreneurs in the mountain villages of North Vietnam since 1994.
Very Good copy
2023, English
Fold-out, double-sided poster, 16 panels, 30 x 21 cm (folded)
Edition of 200,
Published by
Self-Published / Melbourne
$10.00 - In stock -
TEMPLATES by Melbourne/Naarm based artists Rose Nolan and Augusta Vinall Richardson is a conversation and fold-out archive of artworks, published in an edition of 200, designed by Yanni Florence, text edited by Madeline Simm.
This publication was produced in conjunction with TEMPLATE/SKETCH, Augusta Vinall Richardson solo presentation at CAVES Gallery, Melbourne 20 October 11 November, 2023
2022, English
Softcover (thread-bound), 28 pages + A3 insert, 29.7 x 21 cm
Ed. of 100, hand-initialed and numbered.,
Published by
Rose Nolan / Melbourne
$50.00 - In stock -
Working Models For / From Someone's Life is a new artist's book by Melbourne-based artist Rose Nolan, published in a limited edition of 100 copies, each hand-numbered and initialed by Nolan, designed by the artist with Warren Taylor. The volume comprises photographic documentation by Christian Capurro of Nolan's "models", accompanied by text by Ingrid Periz. "Rose Nolan calls the constructions pictured here working models, taking the name of similar objects used in the architectural design process where they are used to check proportion, volume and shape. Occasionally this process of checking prompts a rethink, and a drawing is corrected. Unlike their namesakes, Nolan's models won't prompt any design rethink or correction.Theirs may be a harder task.As she tells me, electronically: "My small models don't have to function (in Real Life) in anyway, other than to stand up for themselves:""—from text by Periz.
"We can think of the models as Cubist "portraits" of fictitious buildings; they are additionally self-portraits of Rose Nolan, Rose Nolan the architect of the buildings and Rose Nolan the consumer, buyer of Apple products, fine French candles, Chanel, Marimekko and Fab, the laundry detergent."
Includes A3 insert of all models as folded poster / catalogue.
Rose Nolan (b. 1959) is an Australian visual artist based in Melbourne working across painting, installation, sculpture, photography, prints and book production. Her practice regularly oscillates between the discrete and the monumental and is informed by a strong interest in architecture, interior and graphic design – combining formal concerns with the legacies of modernism. Nolan’s practice is known for its investigation of the formal and linguistic qualities of words, directly using language to transform the architectural space they inhabit. By making language concrete in this way meaning is allowed to be approached differently.
Nolan employs a radically reduced palette of red and white, and simple utilitarian materials and methods, in an exploration of personal, playful and often self-effacing narratives. Each work describes a concern for economy; a desire to be responsive to site; an interest in seriality and repetition; and the importance of language, interactivity, and the experience of the viewer.
2023, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Published by
Light of Day Books / Melbourne
$10.00 - In stock -
Eliza Hutchison 2002-2004 portraits from the series The Ancestors and The Entertainers were taken by hanging the subjects upside down.
“In this work, Hutchison explores the construction of the imagery solely through her subjects. Here we are confronted by the effect of a prop on a body. We do not see the prop in the portraits, but merely the uncanny effects on the subjects after they have been placed into this prop and then relocated in space. This is examined by Hutchison through the lens of a large format camera and recorded onto photographic plates, reminiscent of daguerreotype photography. Also evocative of this early photography is the stiff nature of Hutchinson’s portraiture (due in the early daguerreotype photography to the long exposures sitters had to endure).”
“…the theatricality is encapsulated in the forensic detail and through the performance undertaken in the production of each image. Once relocated in space, the staging of Hutchison’s sitters is further exaggerated, extending and relocating the boundaries of traditional portraiture. Ultimately, although the photographs are the product of careful, time-consuming staging, the experience of the sitter placed within the prop is fleeting and dangerous. Unlike early portraiture, the stakes are much higher and the effect more radical.”—Ruth Learner, The Ancestors, Un Magazine, 2005
Eliza Hutchison was born in Johannesburg, South Africa 1965 and currently lives and works in Naarm Naarm. Her interest is in exploring our complex and psychological relationship to the photographic image. Her image making practice has extend to use experimental in camera process to develop a biographical record of her life and creative practice. Hair in the Gate, a biograph, 2013 and Family Photos 2021, her first monograph where the biographical as point of departure was used to explore the broader social political context.
@lightofdaybooks. Photography. Sometimes work that has never been shown or published before. Sometimes work that has not been seen for years. Sometimes work that may otherwise never be seen. Mainly just photographs but sometimes with text.
2023, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Edition of 50,
Published by
Light of Day Books / Melbourne
$10.00 - In stock -
Stain Pictures features works from Jane Burton’s A Temptation to Ships, 2018, hand printed, toned and painted gelatin silver photograph, unique 1/1 and Devil’s Playground, 2015, hand printed, toned and painted gelatin silver photograph, unique 1/1
“But in the cosmos there is balm as well as bitterness, and that balm is nepenthe. In the supreme horror of that second I forgot what had horrified me, and the burst of black memory vanished in a chaos of echoing images. In a dream I fled from that haunted and accursed pile, and ran swiftly and silently in the moonlight. When I returned to the churchyard place of marble and went down the steps I found the stone trap-door immovable; but I was not sorry, for I had hated the antique castle and the trees. Now I ride with the mocking and friendly ghouls on the night-wind, and play by day amongst the catacombs of Nephren-Ka in the sealed and unknown valley of Hadoth by the Nile. I know that light is not for me, save that of the moon over the rock tombs of Neb, nor any gaiety save the unnamed feasts of Nitokris beneath the Great Pyramid; yet in my new wildness and freedom I almost welcome the bitterness of alienage.”—H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), an excerpt from The Outsider (1921)
Jane Burton is an artist working with photography, film, and more recently, painting. Her work explores mortality, desire, and isolation and is often darkly ambiguous, enigmatic and provocative. Burton’s work is held in the collections of prominent state and publicly funded galleries, including the National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Gallery of Australia, Museum of Australian Photography, and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. She has been the recipient of artist residencies in Paris (School of Art, University of Tasmania; Art Gallery of New South Wales), London (Australia Council for the Arts), and Beijing (24HRArt). Two monographs of her photographs have been published by M.33, Melbourne: ‘It is Midnight, Dr. ’, in 2017, and ‘Other Stories’, in 2011.
@lightofdaybooks. Photography. Sometimes work that has never been shown or published before. Sometimes work that has not been seen for years. Sometimes work that may otherwise never be seen. Mainly just photographs but sometimes with text.
2023, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Edition of 50,
Published by
Light of Day Books / Melbourne
$10.00 - In stock -
The paintings on interior design magazine photos developed after a hiatus from art making while immersed in family life and domesticity. Creative energies were subsumed into home living spaces, the inside and the garden. I looked at interior design magazines, photos of daydream spaces that were untroubled by the presence of humans; their/my containers of curated longings. Mise-en-sènes, often the realm of the English country house suffused with a collective and projected psychic energy. Rooms and furniture, dense with intangible latent energies that are now interacted with marks of paint, pen and pastel. Scribbling and smudging, tracing the imagined residue of projected desires while responding to the armature of the image in colour, shape and texture. These errant energies enlivened by paint make an intimate liminal interface between magazine and gaze. The emergent interactions are conversational, interventional and absurd. Aloof and amorphous, unconscious spaces become corporeal, thresholds are invaded with the scribbled and smudged paint, claiming a messy subjective presence of painterly process, interaction and decorative hijacking.
Amanda Florence is an artist born in Melbourne/Naarm. She studied BA Fine Arts Joint Hons at Camberwell College of Art, London, UK; Post grad at VCA, Melbourne and MA Creative Arts Therapy, LaTrobe University, Melbourne. She currently makes art at home, gardens and works as a Creative Arts Therapist.
@lightofdaybooks. Photography. Sometimes work that has never been shown or published before. Sometimes work that has not been seen for years. Sometimes work that may otherwise never be seen. Mainly just photographs but sometimes with text.
2023, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Edition of 50,
Published by
Light of Day Books / Melbourne
$10.00 - In stock -
A collection of images I made on film, between 1999-2005, across Australia, Taiwan and Germany. In the photographs are: friends, animals, oceans, one Baxter Immigration Detention Centre protest image, one anti-Woolworths protest image, one lover, one river, one photographic experiment, some trees, and plants.
Katrin Koenning lives and works in Naarm, on unceded Wurundjeri Country.
2023, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Edition of 50,
Published by
Light of Day Books / Melbourne
$10.00 - In stock -
Rose Nolan’s photographs taken in New York in 2010.
Rose Nolan is an artist based in Naarm / Melbourne working across painting, installation, sculpture, photography, prints and book production.
@lightofdaybooks. Photography. Sometimes work that has never been shown or published before. Sometimes work that has not been seen for years. Sometimes work that may otherwise never be seen. Mainly just photographs but sometimes with text.
2023, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Edition of 50,
Published by
Light of Day Books / Melbourne
$10.00 - In stock -
Taken in and around various locations on the Mornington Peninsula this zine of photographs by Emma Phillips reveals a curiosity of place, texture, light, and embodiment. The portraits were early forays into the domain of portraiture, and present as encounters in a skewed and slightly strange world. Just beyond the horizon lies a promise, if only we could reach out and touch it.
Emma Phillips b.1989 Sorrento, Australia Lives and works in Melbourne, Australia Represented by ReadingRoom.
@lightofdaybooks. Photography. Sometimes work that has never been shown or published before. Sometimes work that has not been seen for years. Sometimes work that may otherwise never be seen. Mainly just photographs but sometimes with text.