Lizzie Ridout

Images, from left to right
1 Excoriate (Laser cut)
2 Imbroglio ( Etching)
3 The Shadow of a Whisper from Beneath 1000 Pages (Relief print with white carbon paper)
4 Pages on the studio wall, from left to right: detail of Soliloquy [After Bakhtin] (Silkscreen); Surrender (Silkscreen); The Shadow of a Whisper from Beneath 1000 Pages (Relief print with white carbon paper)
5 Edition of Flee being printed
6-8 Lizzie in the intaglio studio at WSW
9 Lizzie's studio wall in the silkscreen studio

Ways to talk and yet say nothing, or ways to not talk and yet say everything is part of a larger project entitled The Architecture of Conversation. The Architecture of Conversation began as a series of studies examining a collapse in communication between two people through the use of the universally recognised (and oft scorned) speech balloon. Later, however, the project became more focused on linguistic theory and semantics. Philosophers such as Mikhail Bakhtin with his theories on spoken and thought words and Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionist principles have particularly informed this body of drawn, printed and sculptural works.

Ways to talk and yet say nothing, or ways to not talk and yet say everything is a limited edition publication created in collaboration with the Women's Studio Workshop, New York, USA. It is a development of ideas created as part of a project called Architecture of Conversation.

Throughout the duration of the 2-month residency the team at WSW offered invaluable technical assistance and expertise in the creation of the publication, which utilises intaglio, silkscreen, letterpress and lasercut processes and has been produced in an edition of fifty copies. It explores spoken and unspoken communication, in particular monologues, dialogues and colloquies via the speech balloon.

The Women's Studio Workshop is a non-profit visual arts organisation which was founded in 1974 by four women artists who were committed to developing an alternative space for artists to create new work and share skills. Today WSW is the largest publisher of hand-printed artists’ books in the United States. It also offers the only visual arts residency in the United States solely for women.

Since establishing the Artist in Residence (AIR) Programme in 1979, WSW has supported over 500 artists from around the world in paid and unpaid residencies. WSW’s residency programmes have had the continuous support of the National Endowment for the Arts since 2002.

Special collections of major libraries and museums around the world collect WSW's imprints, among them the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Chicago Art Institute, MOMA New York, National Museum of Women in the Arts, J. Paul Getty Museum and the Tate Modern. Standing orders for publications created at WSW are held by repositories at Yale University Indiana University, Rochester Institute of Technology, University of Delaware, Vassar College, Virginia Commonwealth University. WSW also has publications held in over 200 other archives worldwide.

Ways to talk and yet say nothing, or ways to not talk and yet say everything is due for publication in 2012.
Please contact the Women's Studio Workshop for further information or to purchase a copy.

You can see how this project unfolded by visiting Sketchbook (my blog).

The publication and research trip was funded by an Artist's Book Residency Grant from the Women's Studio Workshop and Plymouth University through R1 funding.

Exhibited at: Print Only Please, Roos Arts, Rosendale, New York, USA