Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
INT Things didn’t get much better after the book was released, though. Was the criticism coming from the design community? IB Well I got a state prize in 2014 and I had to spend the money in my field somehow. At first, I thought “let’s make a book”, but then I thought, “no, that’s what I do all day every day, let’s continue what I am already doing,” which was collecting books from the 1500s and 1600s and the 1960s. IB Yeah. I thought it was so horrible! I told my teacher, and the teacher said, “They didn’t hire you? Unbelievable! Come to the place where I work instead.” So I became an intern at the Printing and Publishing Office, before interning at Studio Dumbar. In those days, it was incredibly famous but it was also tiny, and very artistic. And I loved the way they worked. Designer Irma Boom won the Gold Medal for the"Most Beautiful Book in the World" Prize givenat the Leipzig Book Fair IB I had come from an art school which was totally crazy so it was good for me to see another world. I was given loads of freedom there, I immediately became a designer – not a junior designer – I was a designer.
Gaze, Delia; Mihajlovic, Maja; Shrimpton, Leanda (1997). Dictionary of Women Artists: Introductory surveys; Artists, A-I. Taylor & Francis. p.683. ISBN 978-1-884964-21-3. IB What I’ve found is really important is the structure of the content, because everything I do comes from content. I still feel I’m a bad designer but I think about the content and think what concepts come up, I can make a book. I’m not somebody who says, “oh this seems like a very nice composition,” I have never worked in that way. I think, what should a book be as a whole? What am I making for this artist or for these architects? What should it convey? And then in that way, I can think about a form, a scale, paper and all these things, but basically, I have to be able to say, what it is, what I’m doing. If I were to compare myself to an architect, I make social housing. Sometimes I’ll make a villa but that's really rare. La Biennale di Venezia - Artists". www.LaBiennale.org. Archived from the original on June 29, 2017 . Retrieved February 22, 2017. INT You said that when you were doing that project, you felt the pressure. Do you feel that same pressure? You’ve been called the Queen of Books – there’s anticipation when you release new work.Phaidon Editors (2019). Great women artists. Phaidon Press. p.186. ISBN 978-0714878775. {{ cite book}}: |last1= has generic name ( help) While at Yale School of Art in Connecticut (1954-1959), she studied with Josef Albers, Rico Lebrun, Bernard Chaet, George Kubler, George Heard Hamilton, and Vincent Scully, Jose de Riviera, Herbert Mather, Norman Ives, Gabor Peterdi. Her thesis, on "Pre-Incaic Textiles.", was supervised by Junius Bird, archaeologist, of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the artist Anni Albers.
IB There needs to be some challenge in it. For example, last year I spent five months in Rome as a resident at the Vatican Library – it’s something I’ll continue next year. When I was invited it seemed like such a good moment to be able to study books, to look at what happened to the book. For me, there were two things going on. I’m the producer, the maker of the book but I’m also the researcher of the book so that's a parallel path. I will also make a publication at some point on my Vatican studies. It’s such a good source also to be able to see where I am as a book designer. Muzeja savremene umetnosti, Belgrade; Museum of Art, Skopje, Macedonia; Museum of Contemporary Art, Dubrovnic, Yugoslavia; Biblioteca Americana, Bucharest, Romania INT Famously, you work on projects for years, so what’s next for you? Is there anything on the horizon? There are few designers working today who can claim to have the legacy that Irma Boom has. Born in the Netherlands, and still based in Amsterdam today, Boom has practiced for over 30 years under the moniker Irma Boom Office, producing hundreds of books – over 300, in fact.
Weaving as Metaphor
IB Yes. That’s also why for me it is so nice to study at the Vatican Library. All these things which are important for me really have been around already for 500 years. Making books is the most stable medium ever, it’s proved its ability to share information. I think that making a book is a controlled act like a painting or video work, it’s an integral cultural part of our society. And therefore I think that books should also be treated like that. The book is a part of our knowledge and so the book needs attention. Depending on what the content of the book is, it has to have a specific size or it has a weight, or it has volume or there's a specific structure. That's all very important. Pillar of Inquiry/Supple Column". Whitney Museum of American Art. Archived from the original on April 16, 2017 . Retrieved June 26, 2017.
INT Materiality is a massive part of what you do – scale, weight, paper choices. How do these things help you communicate concepts, and why is this important to you? IB Yeah, it’s what I like about making books, it’s a democratic medium. Whatever I make, even if the print run is only 1,000 like Chanel: Livre D’Artistes, what you produce is a democratic object. Sometimes they’re 100 euros, sometimes they’re 10 euros or 20 euros, but the bigger the print run, the better. It’s about sharing this edited information bound and printed to as many people as possible so that everybody can enjoy it.Cordes Sauvages/Hidden Blue (2014). Photograph: Michael Brzezinski/The Deighton Collection. Courtesy of Alison Jacques Gallery, London INT A big moment for you was when you got to design the annual Dutch postage stamp book in 1987. Previously it had been designed by Wim Crouwel, Karl Maartens and Gert Dumbar. How did you manage to land that job at such a young age? INT But the response wasn’t necessarily all positive, was it? There was quite a lot of controversy at the time! IBWell, when he saw my work, he said: “You belong to the fine art department.” So I didn’t go to the Arnhem Art School, I went to the AKI Academy of Art and Design which was a totally radical and crazy school, famous for art but also applied arts.
Camhi, Leslie (March 31, 2011). "A Career Woven From Life". The New York Times . Retrieved April 2, 2019. Alison Jacques to expand with new gallery space on Cork Street, Mayfair". Alison Jacques . Retrieved April 17, 2023. IB Well, after art school I started to work in The Hague at the Government Publishing and Printing Office, in the design department, and in one of the last years I was there, Julius was too. I immediately fell in love with him – he was this very cute, nice boy. His surname is Vermeulen, which is sort of a common name, so I didn’t think anything of it. At some point, I asked, after I’d already fallen in love with him, “Are you related to Jan Vermeulen?” And he said, “That’s my father!” From that moment on, I thought, “OK, I have to keep this guy!” IB We were given great jobs there. But because I didn’t know that much I took on the jobs nobody else wanted. I realised if I did those jobs, nobody was going to be looking at me and realising I didn’t know anything! Intuitively or instinctively, that was a good decision because I could experiment. I could do what I wanted because really no one looked at anything I did. It was like, “Oh, you've done it? OK, it’s fine.”IB While I was at the Printing and Publishing Office, I was mainly doing work for the Ministry of Culture. And as I mentioned before, I always took on the books nobody wanted to do. It meant I was slightly under the radar – nobody looked at what I was making and I did some crazy things – there was one series of adverts I made where things were upside down and all over the place. And then Ootje Oxenaar [a designer of Dutch banknotes], actually Julius’ former boss, who published, together with the Government Printing and Publishing Office, the stamp annuals, saw these ads and he loved them. He said, “I don’t know who made these, but whoever did should get to do the next stamp annual.”
Great Deal 
New Comment