THE BLACK BOOKS

Hardbound books whose every page is black paper, worked with sodium hypochlorite until the colour lifts out of it. One is cased in red cloth. They are made to be opened flat, and they were photographed that way — spine down the middle, both pages at once, so a spread reads as one image rather than two. The vocabulary is the same one that runs through the caustic sheets, but a book lets it behave differently. A constellation started on the left page finishes on the right. A pour runs off the bottom of one leaf and picks up on the next. Some pages are almost empty — three dots and a ruled line — and the one after it is a solid gold web with nothing left of the black. Bleach is not reversible and it keeps working after the hand leaves, so a page cannot be corrected and the book cannot be edited. What is bound is what happened. Dated by their own photographs: every scan in the set was made on 18 December 2017, which puts the books before the CAUSTIC show at Casa Matei in May 2018 and before the degree show that produced the folded books. This is around ninety spreads; eight are shown here.