Talk, Exhibition
The Poetics of Technê
In this talk, Ane Thon Knutsen describes the process of the creation and instellation of Kew Gardens. An adaptation of the short story Kew Gardens, typeset, hand-printed and published by Virginia Woolf in 1919.
The installation follows the story, word by word, color by colors through 1512 individual sheets of 18 gsm Japanese Kozo paper, typeset and printed with moveable type, taking Thon Knutsen 3 months of working in solitude in her private letterpress printshop, using the same technology as Virginia Woolf did when she first typeset and printed Kew Gardens at The Hogarth Press. In this work Ane Thon Knutsen has taken in-spiration from the fragmented conversations of people passing by a flowerbed and Woolf's descriptions of colors and surroundings, changing the colour of the printing ink everytime a new colour is described in the story.
https://cah.fresnostate.edu/english/centers-projects/woolf/speakers.html
The exhibition of a monumental adaptation of Kew Gardens can be seen in the California State Library between 16 May and 11 June 2024.