2 - Artists’ Books in the Medical Community

Summary

In Tattoo (November 1998), an artist's book by American artist Martha Hall, there is a description of ‘a black and white photo of a nude woman with her arms outstretched … / a vine with fl owers tattooed on the scar across her missing breast’ (2003: 30), given to her by her daughter in the form of a postcard. Though unnamed in the book, it is clear Hall is referring to Deena Metzger's The Warrior (briefl y mentioned in Chapter 1). While Hall admires ‘the woman's courage, / her joy / her beauty, / her defiance’ and wonders whether she should also get a tattoo, Tattoo finishes with two questions: ‘Will I dare to prick the surface? Will it help to add another scar?’ (32). The book itself highlights these questions through a sewing needle stuck into its cover, connecting the needle that would be used in a tattoo parlour with the activities of sewing and book making.

The book as a form and idea has rich cultural, spiritual and metaphorical associations, including with the body. Words like skin, spine and joints may refer to both the body of the book and the animal/human body. As is well known, vellum or parchment made of calfskin served as the basis of book production into the early years of the invention of printing. If writing is like an inscription on skin, given the etymological meaning of the verb to write (to scratch), we can understand why poet and physician Rafael Campo claims that ‘writing good iambic pentameter feels like putting stitches into the anonymous, eternally gaping wound of being human, and [that] rhymes can be intertwined like surgical knots’ (1997: 116). Similarly, the binding of a book as the site where its pages stitch together and come apart resonates with the scar.

In ‘The Bookbinder’ from the sequence Self-portrait without Breasts, poet Clare Best, a former bookbinder herself, describes the craft of book making as an alternative, artistic kind of surgery.