Inge Bruggeman

Inge’s work revolves around the idea of the book — the book as object, artefact and cultural icon. She is focused on the revolutionary)nature of the book: in that it is both a technology and an artefact in constant evolution along with the people that interact with it.

Inge makes artist's books, fine press publications, prints, and other text-based art that investigates our personal and collective relationship to the shifting role of the book, print media, and text in our world today.

Some of my favourites of her books include ‘The Infinite Between Us’, a mixed media book that includes letterpress, drypoint intaglio, monotype, silkscreen, and pochoir. Bruggeman describes the contents as mapping the spaces between the known and the unknown. It questions our use of language as a way of owning or knowing something, and was inspired by the 18th century sea explorer Jean-François Galaup de Lapérouse.

Another example is Nowhere To Go’, a concertina/ pamphlet hybrid with illustrations and design built around several poems by Alan Loney. The book was printed from hand-set type and hand-processed photopolymer plates and includes gouache painting on Hahnemühle German Etching paper. 

This book is an attempt at capturing the beauty, brevity, and fragility of life through words, image, and structure. In this case it is a life lived through the book, the body, and the act of writing itself. It is an homage to the French poet and artist bookmaker Pierre Lecuire.

Bruggeman herself is a huge fan of French Literature, and that can be seen in many of her projects and book outcomes. I love that the challenges the notion of what an artist's book can be- not only something to look at and read but a medium through which we can experience a moment- of history or of ambiguous emotion- connecting us not just to the contents but to the entire physical form of the book and the abstract thoughts within. With Bruggeman, everything is  considered, from the cover page to the way the pages are folded, and the care for each book's  whole persona can be really admired in the final publication. 

https://www.ingebruggeman.com/