Eighteen Years Old
Roelof Bakker
• A tabloid newspaper with hand assembled art print. Photographs of broken trees and writing without punctuation recall the evening a gang of queer bashers set out to attack a young man out cruising alone in the early 1980s.
• Publication date 26 October 2024
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Magnificent Bodies
Roelof Bakker
• An artist’s book of postmortem portraits of insects reproduced at an enormous scale. The work responds to the 60% drop in UK flying insect numbers in the last 20 years. Printed on insect wing-like tracing paper, individual insects’ bodies overlay with others, creating futuristic fictional super-large super-flies.
• Edition of ten. Handprinted and hand-assembled to order. Bound or unbound. Archival box with double-print fixed to interior and brass title plate to exterior. Certificate of authenticity.
• Publication date 19 October 2024. Launched at BOP 2024, organised by Martin Parr Foundation and The Royal Photographic Society, Bristol, UK.
For purchase enquiries contact [email protected]
Some Queer Animals
Roelof Bakker
Shortlist Prix du Livre 2024, Arles Les Rencontres de la Photographie. Shortlist EI2024 Photobook Award, Braga, Portugal
• A book of postmortem fossil-like life size cyanotype portraits of British wildlife, the work responding at a local level to the global loss of 70% of wildlife in the last 50 years. An experiment in queering wildlife photography, away from working with high tech equipment, Bakker physically interacted with animals using paper only, the process of documentation proposing a closer, mutually caring relationship with nature and wildlife, to nurture, not destroy.
• With folded double-sided art print insert, poem and essay.
• Publication date 27 October 2023
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Passing Fables & Comparative Readings
Jane Wildgoose
• In the first of a series of artist’s pamphlets presenting soundings from the Lost But Not Forgotten Archive of The Wildgoose Memorial Library concerning the history of collecting during the British colonial era, and its legacies in museum collections today, Wildgoose recalls stumbling upon evidence about the history of collecting that would change her outlook on museums and collecting, and her practice as an artist.
• Publication date 27 October 2023
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‘Lovely Objects’ & Natural History Specimens
Jane Wildgoose
• In her second artist’s pamphlet, Wildgoose traces interconnections between nineteenth-century British colonial expansion, developments in the study of natural history and ideological discourses concerning racial hierarchy, investigating the circumstances surrounding Jane Franklin’s collection of ‘lovely objects,’ as wife of arctic explorer and lieutenant governor of Tasmania John Franklin, during the 1830s and 1840s.
• Publication date 27 October 2023
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The Love That I Need
Roelof Bakker
• A postcard-size handmade book, showing two photographs of the sea at St Leonards-on-Sea alongside a short text recalling crossing the Channel legally as a teenager in search of a new life, drawing parallels to the plight of refugees risking their lives across the Channel without a legal and safe route into the UK.
Edition of 2, 2022
The Night Diana Died/I Remember A Time (Princess)
Roelof Bakker
• Two A5 hand-bound books celebrate Princess Diana as a gay activist, positive role model, humanitarian and subverter of the tabloid press. Collated in a black cardboard box with foil-blocked silver text to exterior. Published on the 25th anniversary of Diana’s death, 31 August 2022.
Edition of 5, 2022
https://rbakker.com/The-Night-Diana-Died
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All The Sunflowers
Roelof Bakker and Vincent van Gogh
• A book as well as a paper sculpture about absence, presence, destruction and finding new connections and ideas by modifying and layering reproductions of Vincent van Gogh’s seven Arles sunflowers paintings, all flowers cut out by hand.
Edition of 7 (not for sale), 2021
I Think Of You
Martin Crawley
• A book mixing layered inkjet prints of imagined Brutalist architecture with writing about casual sex encounters and friends dying of AIDS-related illness in the 1980s/90s, each text relating to a specific London area.
2021
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Unprocessed
Roelof Bakker and George Rodger
• An artist’s book response to witnessing a Holocaust photograph as a child and finally processing this photograph forty years later, the book an experiment in how to present and discuss unimaginable horror without showing it.
2020
https://rbakker.com/Unprocessed
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The Spots That Never Went
Roelof Bakker
Highly Commended Finalist of the 2019 Cornish Family Prize for Art and Design Publishing, presented by the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia
• A newspaper with broadsheet insert explore personal memories of the London 1980/90s AIDS crisis, reclaiming the tabloid form from the gutter press and their hateful attacks on gay men and lesbians. Short sentences each starting with ‘I remember a time’ face enlarged abstract halftone images communicating fragmented memories and forgotten histories.
2018, reprinted 2020
https://rbakker.com/The-Spots-That-Never-Went
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Printed Lies
Roelof Bakker
– “I’m not sure I’ve read a more compelling illustration of why Leave won than Printed Lies.” Steve Anglesey, The New European
• A reproduction and reappropriation in book form of a 2016 Vote Leave NHS campaign video, now a physical paper record of implicit and explicit lies kept in perpetuity at British reference libraries.
Published 2017.
Limited stock available for collections. Contact [email protected]
How Many Hopes Lie Buried Here Mother
Roelof Bakker
• An artist’s book in the shape of a bundle of postcards held together with black elastic band and kept inside a throw-out pocket, contemplates the lost hopes of dead soldiers and their families and friends. A comment on the squander of war, the book is dedicated to teenage Canadian soldier James Carter Irwin and his mother Jennie Carter Irwin. Launched at James’ gravestone at Nunhead Cemetery, London, 31 July 2016, on the centenary of his death aged 18.
• Edition of 50, 2016, contact for availability
https://rbakker.com/How-Many-Hopes-Lie-Buried-Here-Mother
In Camera
Nicholas Royle, David Gledhill
• Hyperreal paintings and experimental fiction explore ideas about surveillance and photography, of watching and being watched in 1970s Stasi East Germany, written in the early stages of the implementation of 21st century mass surveillance technology.
2015, sold out
Placing Stones
Martin Crawley with John Douglas Martin
• A quiet book by artist Martin Crawley remembering friendships and past lovers in writing and gentle pencil drawings of stones collected by the artist from childhood.
2015, sold out
Strong Room
Roelof Bakker and Jane Wildgoose
• A book exploring the lack of physical presence and the tangible in the digital sphere, multiple paper stocks reclaim and emphasise the importance of the tactile experience and the evocative qualities of paper-based archives.
Edition of 150, 2014, sold out
– Selected for ‘Kaleid 2014 - fifty new artists’ books from Europe’ (London) and ‘F Book Show’ (Tokyo, Japan)
https://rbakker.com/Strong-Room
Still: Short Stories Inspired by Photographs of Vacated Spaces
Roelof Bakker, editor
• A book mixing photographs of vacated spaces with new writing inspired by these. A project which helped inspire a local community from temporarily reclaiming a disused town hall as a creative centre. A collaboration with twenty-six writers from across the world, with exhibitions at Hornsey Town Hall and Foyles, London, and a partnership with Foyles and Tate Modern. With Richard Beard, Andrew Blackman, SJ Butler, Myriam Frey, SL Grey, Tania Hershman, James Higgerson, Justin Hill, Nicholas Hogg, Ava Homa, Aamer Hussein, Nina Killham, Deborah Klaassen, Sarah Ladipo Manyika, Claire Massey, Jan Van Mersbergen, Barbara Mhangami-Ruwende, James Miller, Mark Piggott, Mary Rechner, David Rose, Nicholas Royle, Preeta Samarasan, Jan Woolf, Evie Wyld and Xu Xi.
2012, sold out
— Runner-up for Best Mixed Anthology, Saboteur Indy Lit Awards 2013
https://rbakker.com/Still
Negative Press London, 2012-2022: twelve titles published over a decade