Waterlow Palimpsest: Olivia Guigue

Nicolas de Oliveira, Nicola Oxley, Olivia Guigue
Mulberry Tree Press, London, 2021
Design by the artist
Printed by Aldgate Press
96 Pages
Edition of 300 copies
ISBN: 978-1-9160949-2-5

The artwork and writing for this book came together over the period of artist Olivia Guigue’s residency at SE8 Gallery,  extended to nearly two years by the pandemic. As her visits to the foreshore of the Thames produced accretions of new material to be incorporated into a classification of the Anthropocene, the research led to an accumulation of notes, references  and fragments of text. The resulting writing, however,  never seeks to stand in the place of the artwork, while its  digressions into topics such as artists’ museums, serial photography, the Anthropocene and haptics ‘point with a weak finger’ in the direction of associated fields of knowledge that might extend the discussion without explaining or defining, but by ‘keeping the pieces in play’. The outcome is a miscellany made up of fragments  organised into an open classification structure that can be read in any order, and includes edited material drawn from  the artist’s emails to the authors that chronicle aspects of her process.