Sounds of Clouds is an artist book designed by Tana Mitchell with and for The Ghosts of Nothing (Sean Lowry and Ilmar Taimre) that reconfigures the atmospheric archive through found imagery and historical fragments. Drawing on century-old cloud atlases in multiple languages, vintage postcards, and film stills from the eponymous moving-image work, the book enacts an intermedial dialogue between history, memory, and perception. Its pagination corresponds indexically with the sequencing of the original source materials, foregrounding the book form as both document and autonomous artwork. Refusing conventional narrative resolution, the project exemplifies how artists’ books can operate as disrupted, non-linear, and conceptually generative works that invite readers into a layered encounter with representation, classification, and the ineffable qualities of clouds.<p></p>
NTRO Output Category
- Original Creative Work : Visual artwork
Place
MelbourneNTRO Publisher
The Ghosts of NothingMedium
Postconceptual artResearch Statement
Sounds of Clouds (Artist Book) emerges from a lineage of artists’ books that challenge conventional narrative and material logics. Drawing on century-old cloud atlases, multilingual fragments, vintage postcards, and film stills, the book constructs an atmospheric archive in which pagination itself performs an indexical dialogue between history, chance and artistic reconfiguration.
This artist book contributes to the expanded field of artists’ publishing by enacting a materially indexical structure that resists linear narrative. Integrating imagery and text fragments from historical cloud atlases, postcards, and cinematic traces, it positions the book form as both archive and artwork. By aligning pagination with the found sequence of source material, it foregrounds the book’s capacity to disrupt and reinvent conventions of ordering, meaning and reception to advance understandings of non-narrative, intermedial and postconceptual forms.
This artist book rethinks the book as both a site of archival reactivation and a medium of conceptual disruption. Appropriating and re-paginating historical representations of clouds, the work highlights the instability of knowledge systems and the cultural contingency of classification systems. Its interweaving of postcards, atlases, and cinematic fragments blurs distinctions between art, document, and ephemera, situating the book as an autonomous artwork rather than a supplementary form. By collapsing temporal, linguistic, and media registers into a materially exuberant constellation, Sounds of Clouds advances critical understandings of the artist book as a non-linear, intermedial form that is highly relevant within contemporary art, publishing and expanded archival practicesSize or Duration of Work
174 page original limited edition (x 500) artist bookAffiliation
Sean Lowry, University of Melbourne
