Fernanda Fedi on the Artist’s Book from the National Museum of Women in the Arts’, Washington USA, 2007

‘It’s the quality of the artist that makes the artist’s book. It’s the artist who avails herself of every kind of material at her disposal in order to shape it according to her idea, her interpretation, her thoughts. It’s the artist who hammers and creates the book without having to get help from others for its accomplishment: however, the artist’s book is essentially a book in one single copy or in a few copies which has been conceived, imagined, hammered by the artist’

‘Words, signs, and calligraphy are expression of an interior world often associated with music, poetry, and archaic languages of the imagination. I have been working with the idea of signs and writing since 1980. A repeated sign can be an obsession – a symptom of a neurosis changed into a poetic vibration.

In the artist’s book, I justaxpose signs with music, poetry, and language. The work holds my own subconscious vibrations, which are a mixture of thouthts, sensitivity, awareness of the void, and an inexplicable something else. When I study it, I see things of which I was not aware when I was painting. But when I look again I see things there, in my endless book.