Artist Book: Circling Stones, leporello risography

-Circling, spinning around your lover’s navel, enclosing like a ring, endless line, always around the bend, don’t get sick, roundabout, enclosing everything, infinite path –

The Source

How it started is now difficult to pin down a year and a half later. Did it start with the colour green? Did it start with a story one of us heard, but which we have already forgotten? Did it start with a movie scene or with a drawing of an eleven-year-old girlfriend? If we think back now, this subject has been around longer than we can remember and the subject existed in both our imagination, with both of us as a desire to work with, to explore artistically. The shapes, the colours, the stories. The myths, the powers, the meaning. The Dragon Serpent, The Serpent Dragon, The Mythical Dragon, The Ouroboros, The Rainbow Serpent.

Waterfalls and rainbows

In these photos you can see the first artist’s book we made that circles around the dragonsnake. It started with a collection of stones from the bed of a small river that sprang from a waterfall. Because yes, dragons live near waterfalls. They protect them, bathe in their shade and meet the rainbow there. The stones showed us the traces of the glittering dragon power.

With the stone collections we searched for dragon snake shapes, to find the archetype. Finding the double Ouroboros. And in colours and layers in the prints, the dragon’s skin reappeared. The rainbow also suddenly became visible in the book.

Edition

This artist’s book is a unique copy. We showed it during an exhibition in Amsterdam (NDSM FUSE, September 2022). Now in the fall of 2023 we will make a new version and even print a small edition of the book.

Barbara Collé & Uta Neumann
Circling stones, 2022, artist book, 26 pages.
Risograph, leporello.