Variations on a Theme : The Pillar #44/180

Limited edition number 44/180 signed and numbered Artist books

This hand assembled new artists book produced by Stephen Gill, features 30 unpublished and new small c type prints from The Pillar, each book has a unique printed dust jacket incorporating lino cut and mono prints by Stephen, all housed in music scores.

Edited and sequenced by Stephen Gill Published by Nobody 30 Tipped in c-type machine prints on Chrystal archive paper Housed in music scores from 1949 – 1956 Book jackets on Takeo paper with lino cut and mono print artwork Varying number of pages 132 x 198 mm
Letterpress title and end pages Softcover Edition of 180

Edition of 180, signed and numbered

Published in 2024 / Nobody

A pillar knocked into the ground next to a stream in a flat, open landscape, trees and houses visible in the distance, beneath a vast sky. That is the backdrop to all of Stephen Gill´s photographs in this book. We see the same landscape in spring and summer, in autumn and winter, we see it in sunshine and rain, in snow and wind. Yet there is not the slightest monotony about these pictures, for in almost every one there is a bird, and each of these birds opens up a unique moment in time. We see something that has never happened before and will never happen again. That it takes place in the midst of a landscape characterised by repetition, in which time is cyclical, sets up a keen existential dynamic: on the one hand, everything has happened before, there’s nothing new under the sun; on the other, every moment is unique and carries the hallmark of the miracle: what happens happens only once and never again.

But this wasn’t what I thought about the first time I looked at these photographs. In fact, I barely thought at all, for I was shaken, as a person so often is when confronted with an extraordinary work of art. I’d never seen birds in this way before, as if on their own terms, as independent creatures with independent lives. Ancient, forever improvising, endlessly embroiled with the forces of nature, and yet indulging too. And so infinitely alien to us.

Karl Ove Knausgård