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39. Artists books

Chosen by:
Peter Lyssiotis

Cavalieri, Angela.

1316 - Angela Cavalieri, Peter Lyssiotis. (Melbourne : Masterthief, 2004-2007) 2 v. (to be completed in 3 vols.)

Cavalieri, Angela.

We’d read Dante’s Divine Comedy. We’d looked through the illuminated versions of the text from Gustav Dore to Tom Phillips. The initial impetus for the work however was when Angela returned from a trip to Rome and a visit to the Vatican with photographs of the texts that circled the interiors of the churches there.

We aimed for those things in Dante’s vision that echoed through to our own times. Consequently the title 1316-. 1316 is the accepted date of when Dante finished his master work whose relevance still grips our imagination and therefore the  - .

Technically the major task we have set ourselves is to find geometric shapes to represent Dante’s world. We landed firstly on the circle (for Hell), then the triangle (for Purgatory) and Book 3 the square will represent Paradise.

We have used acid free papers, printed on them folded, torn and cut them then housed them in a box. The texts are all our own even though they have been bounced off Dante’s original. The linocuts have been printed by hand while the photograph images have been reproduced using screen printing and inkjet.(Was it a coincidence that these first two books were made during the 11 year term of John Howard’s government?)

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