Recently I was quite excited to run across a book illustrating Edward Gordon Craig’s “Black Figures”, a series of woodblock prints which this artist produced between 1907 and 1919. Because the book is somewhat rare I know that I never would have found Gordon Craig’s prints had I not been an art librarian. The unexpected discovery of an artist’s work or a new technique is, for me, one of the benefits of being a librarian/artist.

Working in an art library is a natural extension of my interests since I am an artist creating primarily in book form. I’m attracted to the intimacy of books as art: holding, opening, handling a book is very appealing. My box-books use a lot of found paper, including scraps of discarded books. War and Peace Fragments was made in reaction to the Gulf War and reading Tolstoy. My books are often a mix of personal and political concerns.

In my painting, I use interiors and exterior settings to look at the concept of singularness. Images expressing the idea of being alone are at one end on a continuum, images of loneliness, at another. A disquieting stillness hangs on at each end of the continuum, an absence of things implied.

My inter-relationship with visual resources coordination and my artwork is one of symbiosis. An encyclopedic array of images repeatedly brought to attention influences my imaging. Since my ideas are constantly growing and altering, forgotten images are brought to the forefront and become useful historical references as well as new learning material.

My employment as a slide curator followed a fascination with the slide lectures given by my studio instructors that revealed what interested and inspired them. Working daily with a slide collection is rewarding in providing resources for those teaching and studying the history of art. It provides me in turn with an overview of how art changes and repeats itself both in content and style, as governments rise, fall and merge, and religious beliefs and social conditions change.

Several years after becoming a professional librarian in 1972, I became involved in mail art. This international network of cooperating artists has expanded my vision of both the world and my profession. Over the years, I have taken it upon myself to document various activities in mail art, which would have remained unexamined without the involvement of someone who was both an active participant in the medium and the possessor of professional research skills. In so doing, I have been able to integrate two important facets of my life.

My work as a reference librarian puts food on the table, without which – the table, that is – my art would be beneath notice.

I think it is necessary for librarians, artists and computer-niks to cooperate with each other to develop art documentation in Japan. As I am involved with the three fields; library science, fine arts and computer science, I would like to foster the growth of art documentation.

My view of the world has always been private and intimate. My interpretation of what I see, therefore, has always been in very small formats. One friend has called them “Postage Stamp” images. The limited space I give myself to work is a challenge in making a huge concept, like space or flight, small.

Il n’y a pas de relation directe, mais de contiguïté, entre mon travail d’artiste et celui de bibliothécaire.

En tant qu’artiste – j’ai commencé avec le film en 1976 puis la photographie en 1978 – j’ai toujours été intéressé par le livre: j’ai participé dans les années 70 à la création d’une revue d’art (Melba) et m’occupe aujourd’hui d’une petite maison d’édition consacrée au cinéma comme forme d’art (Paris vu par le cinéma d’avant-garde 1923-1983; Peter Kubelka).

I work three days a week for the North York Public Library Board: one day at the Central Library’s Literature and Fine Arts Department, and two at the York Woods Library, a regional branch with high immigrant use. As a part-time librarian and as an artist focussing on the more traditional aspects of art, drawing and painting, I usually leave library thoughts at the library door. If anything, it’s the patrons themselves who have inspired my art. However, the Fine Arts collection at the Central Library provides me with resource materials to observe and connect what artists in the past have done to what I seek to do now.

Since graduating from library school I have worked as a “small press” micropublisher, issuing microfilm editions of newspapers and serials relating to Canadian social and political history. My interests include art and architecture, the ethnic press (especially that of the pre-World War II period), labour history, women’s history, and the alternative press including gay and lesbian periodicals.

Like most librarians, I spend a large part of my time organizing information and helping others to find it, but as an artist, I sometimes find an image more interesting to appropriate than to classify.

The word “appropriation” as applied to art has in some ways supplanted the concept of the found object. Appropriation refers to the use of images (taken from many sources, including art history) that have been not only removed from their original context, but re-combined with other images to form a new context, a new work of art.

OR is an artist’s multiple in pamphlet form, produced with inexpensive, readily-available materials and methods in editions of around one hundred. Operating outside of commercial galleries, there was never any intention of selling current issues of OR; however, back issues are now for sale and some are very expensive. One hundred and fifty editions have been produced since 1976.

It has never particularly crossed my mind that there is any special relationship between my work as an art librarian and my work as an artist. Librarianship was more of a profession, a way of earning a living. Making art is usually more fun than watching television.

My involvement as an artist and as an art librarian allows me to see a full spectrum of art history from its inception by an artist to its assessment by an art historian. It enables me to better understand the needs of faculty and students in the field of visual arts, as well as to interface effectively with faculty and scholars in art history. My gallery membership at SOHO 20 in New York City provides me with insight into art trends in the making. It demonstrates well a woman’s place in the contemporary art world, and a role of a critic in promoting or establishing an artist. I feel that this knowledge makes me a better librarian.

How did I come to be both an artist and a librarian? From the start, I never wanted to support myself with my art. Way back then my art was private. In order for the work to be true, it was best protected from the whims of the market. And since I had to work, I might as well contribute to the common weal, and do nothing that could harm the social fabric. After several years of experimenting with social work, sales, bookkeeping, cocktail waitressing, organizing Camp Fire Girls, census-taking, and other sundry occupations, it was finally librarianship that demanded the most of my top-notch liberal arts education and my desire to do good in a world so complex that it was often impossible to know what was good from what was not.

To work as an art librarian is to work among images from the past and present – reproduced in and out of context. And not only those one searches for – but those stumbled across en route to somewhere else.

I entered art librarianship thinking that it would be but an adjunct to my activities as an artist. I have come to realize that the reverse has occured. My art has come to elaborate on my role as a librarian in an architectural museum library.* It reflects and redefines my constant exposure to architectural imagery and criticism. This example is from a series of mixed media works which resulted from a trip I made to India two years ago.