Memento Civitatem is an artists' book produced with visual artist Alice Maher (Nine Silences, 2018). It is the first artists' book commissioned by the National Gallery of Ireland and was originally created to accompany their exhibition of archival material relating to important Irish art figures who were active during the foundation of the Irish state. Our research found that these artists were linked by a particular interest in social and political action and it's this energy that we have taken our initial inspiration from. commemorated during Ireland’s Decade of Centenaries.
Originating from research into the art, lives and ideals of six Irish artists – Grace Gifford, Sarah Cecilia Harrison, Aloysius O’Kelly, William Orpen, Sarah Purser and Jack B. Yeats – Memento Civitatem explores our contemporary relationship to culture, citizenship, imagination and activism. Inspired by the iconography of the Tarot card, a medium open to diverse and contradictory readings, the book presents twenty-one iconic image cards alongside words and phrases that are open to the reader's interpretation. Through the hand-set typography and an intuitive approach to image-making, Memento Civitatem is an ode to some of the artistic practices and the letterpress production processes of the period.
The book (just as the original for the gallery) consists of 24 folded leaves, 21 of which carry a hand coloured image which takes the iconography of the tarot as its visual language, each image surrounded by a letterpress printed typographic landscape relating to the state of the country, the continent, the planet. This is a protest book and its intention is for every reader to find their own story and pathway in its pages. All sheets contained in a solander box. It has been designed for display, so all leaves can be viewed at once.
Memento Civitatem was commissioned on the occasion of the exhibition Roller Skates & Ruins (curated by Marie Lynch, Andrea Lydon and Donal Maguire at the ESB Centre for the Study of Irish Art).
This edition of 40 copies, made during the production of the original, is printed on 300gsm Gmund cotton paper from a range of grotesque woodtypes accompanied by Adrian Frutiger's Meridien. The image cards were first drawn in pen and ink, then scanned and printed from polymer plates, and finally hand-coloured. Inspired by The Cuala Press' Broadsides, each image card is contained in a bifolium, together housed in a red cloth covered Solander box.
