PANTHEON

2000; edition of 45 plus 5 artist's proofs
15.25 x 15 in, 387 x 381 mm; 66 sheets folded at the fore-edge to give 132 pages.

Polychrome letterpress from composing-room materials, wood blocks and zinc and polymer plates. Many images derived from photography by Esther May Campbell and worked by me on the computer. The book sits in a drop-backed box, and is Japanese sewn onto five flat bands and bound in alum-tawed calf.

Said calf to echo a scalp within whose skull the book sometimes takes a notional stroll. This is the latest book, and took four years in the making.

One becomes two, two becomes three, and by means of the third and fourth achieves unity; thus two are but one… Invert nature and you will find that which you seek… Join the male and the female, and you will find what is sought

A nigh perfect building, the Pantheon allows the sun in its declination to pass an ellipse of light through the oculus, the round hole in its domed roof; thereby describing an arc about the inside of the dome. This arc illumines and is changed by the local detail: the coffering, and the architraves from which the gods have fled. Thus a thought as illumination from without may be moderated by that within, and the outer world so deduced. Which proposes the Pantheon as a model for the skull.

The skin of the building shows sets of receding four-sided figures: the coffering. In the book a grid of wooden squares is printed, at first to suggest Roman building and pavements; and later more wildly interpreted as the torch of attention swings repeatedly around the four corners of the page, and offering combinations of image, colour and form. Light from without finds the face in the skull. A portrait from within.

Four becomes three, and thereafter becomes the dualities of left and right, day and night, two banks of a dark river and a single corpse that, during conception, never gained resolution along its material mid-line. The head floats as a vanishing ark on the amniotic flood. You are invited to both sink and swim.

I have emphasised the structure of a book by having the Chinese binding confined by a European case. This makes the pages sit up when opened so the book is never seen flat. I also pursued, as in The Word Returned, 'sWings, 'sWings and Firedogs, and the very first book A few ways through the window, the reversing of the order of images and texts for a symmetry in the opening and closing of the work. For instance the Sanskrit MAHA and AHAM as proto-words; for instance at the book's beginning and at the book's end this maker is seen to hand in the wand in the hand.