Shelagh Atkinson: Dig: An Excavation of Mine
Published by the Women’s Art Library, 2024
Texts by Shelagh Atkinson, Stuart Duffin RSA, Dr Althea Greenan, and Colin R Greenslade
Designed by James Brook
Soft cover with flaps | 210 x 155 mm | 56 pages | Printed by Gomer, Wales, on Edixion Offset
It has been an absolute pleasure to collaborate on this publication with Shelagh Atkinson, a multi-disciplinary artist working across print, painting, drawing, photography, sound and mail art. In 2019 Atkinson was one of a small number of artists to be selected for an intensive programme run by Art360 Foundation in conjunction with Creative Scotland to support the development of her archive and legacy. In 2023, Art360 released a documentary film by award-winning filmmaker, David Bickerstaff, exploring the artist’s legacy. Following on from that award and film, this publication once again delves into the artist’s extraordinary archive of work.
The publication began as a series of conversations that started in Shelagh’s studio in Patriothall, Stockbridge. It’s always fascinating to visit an artist’s studio and to see work that is both finished and in progress alongside the other materials, objects and ephemera that inspire an artist’s practice. I was delighted to see a tape cassette of the eponymous Flying Lizards album from 1979 on Shelagh’s shelf – as a teenager, this album was a huge inspiration and I still find new references in its dense sound collages. Aside from music, Shelagh and I bonded over a wide range of topics including LGBTQ+ identities, left-wing politics, and working outside of the mainstream.
It became clear in our conversations, and through looking closely at Shelagh’s work, that a conventional monograph or catalogue was not going to do justice to the breadth of her practice and that a linear chronological approach was not going to reveal the many inter-connections that are present in her work. I suggested that we should take a layered approach that aimed to create meanings by the juxtaposition of text and images (and ephemera). With hindsight, I can’t help but wonder if the cover of that Flying Lizards album with its densely-layered Xerographies by the artist and graphic designer Laurie-Rae Chamberlain was a subliminal inspiration.
We continued to have conversations and Shelagh started to send me images of her work. I had suggested that maybe a thematic approach, excavating subjects in her practice, would suit the arrangement of the book. We talked more about the idea of layering and, in my head, an idea of how the book might look started to appear. As much as I love talking about projects with artists, there is always a moment when I feel it is important to start sharing rough designs on screen as the ideas in my head may not match the artist’s ideas or represent the ideas that I have been attempting to articulate. Shelagh sent me a set of images and a text for the first section and I set about working up some visual roughs.
One of the many things in Shelagh’s practice that resonated with me is her use of stencil alphabets to create words in paintings, prints and drawings, to form a sort of handwriting. Using a full alphabet that Shelagh had drawn with two different sets of stencils, I created vectors of each letter that could be assembled to make words which could then be enlarged, coloured and adapted – these stencil letters formed the foundation of the design of the book. I used Shelagh’s stencil letters alongside the typeface Founders Grotesk, a more characterful – but still discreet – alternative to Helvetica that Shelagh has used on other projects.
The first section that I worked on was titled ‘Drawing’. As well as images, Shelagh gave me a short text to act as an introduction to the section and I was given free range to work up some ideas using the materials I had been given. I presented three versions to Shelagh: a fairly classic presentation of the works; a more ‘out there’ version; and finally a version that most closely resembled the ideas that had been brewing in my head. I was delighted that Shelagh went with the third version and it was this iteration, with some changes suggested by Shelagh, that formed the backbone to the design of the rest of the book. We had already agreed that the images would not be captioned (a list of works appears at the end of the book) so, aside from the page numbers, which are consistently placed, I was free to design each page in response to the works that Shelagh had selected for that spread, creating dialogues and connections between the images and texts.
I used coloured shapes with a palette of colours sampled from the works themselves to create abstract elements that frame the works alongside repetitions of texts, stencilled words, and details from other works such as drawings, scribbles, marks and glitches. Sometimes the layerings are dense, and sometimes they are stripped back. Through a series of exchanges of PDFs of the layouts between Shelagh and myself, I adjusted the designs until we were both happy with the result. The layout remained fluid throughout: works were moved around, new ones added, and some removed. Each section was designed separately, one at a time, building on from the design of the previous section. Sometimes I would return to the previous section adding elements from the latest section: there was a cumulative effect of layers as the book grew, section by section. Some sections arrived more easily while other sections took longer to settle – I really enjoyed this collaborative process and it gave me an opportunity to work more intuitively than usual, perhaps more like an artist – reflecting my roots as a painter – rather than as a graphic designer.
Dig: An Excavation of Mine is printed on Edixion Offset, an economical white uncoated paper that takes ink well which I have used in other projects. The paper has a softness about it that I felt was appropriate for the project, with perhaps a hint of a sketchbook about it. The book has a soft cover with flaps – the rear flap is glued at them top and bottom to form a pocket to hold one of Shelagh’s postcards, Holding Left, Left Holding. I was delighted to find that, when the finished book came back from the printer, it was completed and felt whole by the inclusion of Shelagh’s postcard. A true collaboration.
