Design as medium, not vessel: a book that stages its own systems of meaning.

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A book that performs its own systems, Addenda to a Sequence of Appearances was designed in close collaboration with conceptual artist Walead Beshty, extending his material and theoretical concerns into the language of editorial design. Rather than functioning as a passive record, the publication enacts its own processes of framing and display – making visible the mechanisms through which meaning is produced, circulated and contained in print.

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Running heads, section markers and paratexts are amplified into a kind of procedural excess, exposing the inherited codes and conventions of publishing. A 42-line baseline grid, referencing the Gutenberg Bible, anchors the book within the historical lineage of typographic standardisation, while the interplay of image and text resists hierarchy, instead sustaining a spatial rhythm in which both operate in continuous, equal dialogue.

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Negative space becomes a structuring device – creating pause, silence and disruption – while the repetition of visual motifs introduces a deliberate sense of rule-awareness and rule-breaking. The material palette, including Mohawk Superfine, GardaMatt and a cloth-bound, round-backed spine, was selected for its tactility, durability and conceptual coherence, reinforcing the book’s status as an object circulating within systems of artistic and editorial exchange. More than an archive, the book acts as a critical extension of Beshty’s practice – a performative system in its own right, reflexively staging the conditions of its own making.

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Artist: Walead Beshty 

Gallery: Thomas Dane Gallery

Art Direction, Design & layout: Billie Temple

Publisher: Hurtwood Books