220 x 300mm, 144 pages, various print methods for interior printing, softcover with foil detail, perfect bound, 2022

Adventurous printmaking embraces linked practices of textile, photography, wall painting, and social activism for Irish and Canadian artist Ciara Phillips. This new monographic artist book Free Hot Mess includes a broad representation of Ciara Phillips’s commitment to artmaking and was initiated by Agnes Etherington Art Centre to extend the exhibition Ciara Phillips: Comrade Objects. Essays by Jen Kennedy, Melissa Gronlund and Sunny Kerr investigate the work’s engagements with new potentials of duration, feminist ideas of labour and collective processes of radical enjoyment with a focus on the influential social practice piece, Workshop (2010–ongoing). The publication’s lively contents fold together multiple temporalities into their own exuberant activity of production. A responsive energy spills into the book format, where commercial printing processes appear as recognitions of art’s sister practices. The format was conceived by Ciara Phillips and Fraser Muggeridge to double as a book and an exhibition of eighteen posters. Folded, cut, and bound together in 16-page sections it forms a 144-page book.

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