Lazybones ─ Ruth van Beek
A unique artist’s edition situated between book and collage, giving renewed form to overlooked images from the artist’s archive.
Lazybones is an original edition work by Dutch artist Ruth van Beek, available for a limited period. Created in collaboration with RVB Books, the project consists of twenty unique leporellos, each containing a different arrangement of images selected from van Beek’s archive collection—the same source material she uses in her wider studio practice. By making small cuts into the paper surface and inserting each image by hand without glue, van Beek employs a method reminiscent of old-fashioned photo albums, allowing the photographs to be held in place through a quiet and tactile form of construction.
These handmade books give a kind of body to small, seemingly useless photographs that had long remained within the artist’s archive. Gathered and cut from old books and magazines over many years, these images once served both to instruct and to distract, to convey information and to invite reverie. Repositioned within a new arrangement and context, and reconnected both as objects and as representations, they form a kind of incantation: fixed, bound together, and irreversibly linked. The elongated format of the leporello, together with the imagery itself, draws on forms of visual language familiar from everyday life and history—sequences used to teach, narrate, sing or cast spells. The pink shape evokes the body, legs, bones and intestines, while the inserted photographs suggest an inner life, like the capillaries of the archive itself. Images once dismissed as idle or insignificant are here brought to the foreground, handled with care, and offered back to the viewer with renewed attention.
Limited edition of 20 unique books + 2 A.P. Signed and numbered by the artist.
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Title: Lazybones
Artist: Ruth van Beek
Publisher: RVB Books, 2024
Format: Softcover leporello with silkscreen-printed shape and hand-cut, inserted photos from the artist’s archive, housed in a slipcase
Size: 160 × 250 mm (closed) / 1920 × 250 mm (unfolded)
Pages: 12-page leporello
Language: n/a
Edition: Limited edition of 20 unique books + 2 A.P.