Art Projects

Hell Mend You

Price composes the text to accompany the launch of Hell Mend You, the new fashion line from Charles Jeffrey and the LOVERBOY label. Price's voice-over is used for the social media campaign. Launched in London Fashion Week January 2020. Coverage in the fashion press includes: Fashionably Male.

Guernica Poetica

Poets So Mayer and Richard Price take several figures featured in Picasso's famous painting and compose contemporary poetry for each. The result is a political response which doesn't for a moment imagine mass bombing and towers in flames are part of a past we have superseded. Produced for the Guernica Remakings exhibition at the National Poetry Library, London, with accompanying event and filmed responses.

Digital

A book that sits in the palm of your hand mimicking the brochure that comes with a smart phone. Waiting for you to read its quietly subversive message. 36 pages; printed inkjet in grey and red on 15 of the facing pages; cover with rounded corners in Bockingford watercolour paper 300gsm. A collaboration between Julie Johnstone and Price, published in 2018 and available from essence press

Sedna and the Fulmar

A retelling of the Inuit myth with blind embossing by Ron King and new poems by Richard Price, published by Circle Press in 2017.

Going, Going, Gone

Bestiary with a collection of 7 illustrated poems, written by Richard Price, with blind emboss work and colour by Ron King, published by King's Circle Press in 2013. Set in Bembo by Joanna Mersey and printed together with the artist onto variously coloured rag made Khadi papers. 7 folding prints in a red blind-embossed wrapper, held in a crimson folder with an iridescent butterfly on the cover and a deep-gray slipcase. Published to present the case for 7 creatures which are being mistreated and which are on the point of disappearing, or have already 'Gone!'. Creatures include Armadillo, Dodo, Chimpanzee, and Elephant. Limited to only 30 copies.

24 Seven at Gooden Gallery London: NierghtravAOlnWint'slf A Teller

A collaboration with Simon Lewandowski and seven other artists in the autumn days of 2010. Price contributes the text to the first installation in this week-by-week work based in the gallery's enclosed window space. Later, Price contributed further work to the associated publication A book in 8 chapters and 4 dimensions edited by Lewandowski (Wild Pansy Press, 2011).

Wake Up and Sleep

An artist's book by Caroline Isgar and Richard Price. Emerging from a commission from the Calouste Gulkenkian Foundation and the Royal Society of Medicine this extremely limited edition work partners Isgar's delicate etchings with Price's three-part poem exploring sleeplessness.

folded

An artist's book by Richard Price, with design by Julie Johnstone (Edinburgh: Essence Press, 2008). Limited edition of 100, each signed by Price and Johnstone. Experience this delicate, refreshing meditation on the page as a field of thought in the act of its unfolding....

Order this book.

Hotel, Motel, Motet

Video Clip

A digital collaboration with Simon Lewandowski, premiered at the Hull Literature Festival, 2008.

Lewandowski comments:

It is one of a series of experiments in the re-staging of narrative in a form which blends the visual, the verbal and the physical – poetry, animation and sculpture. The piece will be installed in public spaces to “perform” its texts continuously, allowing a passing audience to give it as much or as little time as they choose, rewarding prolonged attention with a contantly-shifting cycle of possible combinations. We hope that Hotel/Motel/Motet will gently introduce a literary audience to new ideas in Electronic and Media Art and a visual art audience to equally exciting currents in contemporary poetry. For viewers new to both fields we hope it will be a generous and accessible work based as it is in those most ubiquitous devices of storytelling and wordplay.

little but often

An artist's book by Ronald King and Richard Price, published by Circle Press, pairing Ronald King at his most elegantly minimalist with a new suite of love poems by Price (mode: witty, tender). Image and info at Vamp & Tramp

Arc Editions

Arc is the collective set up by Victoria Bean, Karen Bleitz and Sam Winston. Richard Price has worked with Arc Editions in the past. In the article "Words in Process" in the Artists Book Yearbook, 2008/9 he gives an illustrated account of their work.

The Mechanical Word

Five mechanical books by Karen Bleitz and Richard Price, Circle Press, 2005. Limited edition of twenty copies. First shown at the Circle Press exhibition, The Pentagram Gallery, London, May 2005.

Price recalls:

The book artist Karen Bleitz conceived the idea of books which would explore the political and emotional sub-texts of the mainstay English verbs. This uses the idea of a grammar of language, written by Karen in often a funny sly way, to face a mechanical object within the book whose movement demonstrates the underlying edginess of the verbs (to have, to do, etc). A third element, a text which dramatises the verbs, interacts with the mechanical object once the page is turned. Karen used 3-D computer modelling software to plan the books, especially critical for understanding their moving parts before investing in the laser cutting of the physical objects, and I supplied the dramatising text. The project evolved over several years, changing colour, design and text as we actively collaborated on its development, revising and re-thinking our own contributions as we went on. It is the most genuinely collaborative work I’ve yet done, and I especially like the way a broadly theoretical framework, constructivist blocks of colour, physical animation, and very human vocal texts, come together.

A Twenty-Piece Puzzle

Text by Richard Price, visual art by Chan Ky-Yut, Lyric Press, 2004, Limited edition of three copies. Private collections.

Release Every Pattern

A sculpture by David Annand with text by Richard Price and Leona Medlin. Staines High Street, 2004. Winner of Spelthorne Design Award, 2004.

Both Leona and myself were based in Staines and knew a bit about its history. We were approached by David for a text, and we each wrote one or two, advised each other on them, then offered David the selection. He took "Release Every Pattern" which, as well as remembering the industrial history of the town, invites readers to think of every kitchen and bathroom as a place of art, not just galleries. The poem winds itself round the roll of lino the two figures in the sculpture are carrying.

Renfrewshire in Old Photographs

With Raymond Friel, published by Mariscat, 2000.

It was only after we'd published this book and I began to see more and more artists' books which were text-based conceptual works, often with very little visual element, that I realised Raymond and I had made that kind of artists' book without knowing it. Raymond's re-use of interviews with survivors of the bombing of Clydeside during the war, his recreations of voices down the centuries, and my own poems which also populate a "Renfrewshwhere" that is both known and not really known - all that really does add up to an artists' book in the text-based tradition. Hamish Whyte at Mariscat was so open to the project, and the fact that Raymond and I had known each for years but knew very different parts of the county and brought that experience to the range of texts - well, it's one of my favourite books.

Gift Horse

Text by Richard Price, drawn in wire by Ronald King, Circle Press, 1999. Limited edition of fifty copies. Buy this book

I'd wanted to collaborate with Ron King ever since I became aware of the range and richness of his and other Circle Press books. The white horses inscribed on the English downs, especially the near abstract Uffington Horse, were the inspiration for the book. Ron saw straight away that a white-on-green approach would be too simple and his blind-embossed horse, which uses shadow and light itself, moving as the pages are turned, is such a full-of-life complement to the text. The book starts at a stand-still and ends with a gallop. I would make books with Ron forever, if I could.

Sense and a Minor Fever

Texts by Richard Price with illustrations by Peter Robinson, Vennel Press, 1993

Peter Robinson talked at length with me about the poems and the ideas behind the collection before embarking on the work, and the drawings capture what I hope is the gentle surrealism of the texts.