Bank Street Arts

Due to demand and visitor numbers this exhibition is being extended until mid November

The third Sheffield International Artist’s Book Prize Exhibition follows on from our inaugural chapter in 2008 and the second edition of the Prize in 2009. Due to the amount of work involved in organising and staging the prize, as well as the exhibitions that follow on from the prize itself, we made the decision last year to make this a biennial event.

The first two editions of the Sheffield Artist’s Book Prize brought in more than 150 entries from around the world and have resulted in a unique collection of books here at Bank Street which are now available to the public as a permanent reference collection. In addition to this, the expansion of the prize in 2009, with the addition of both student and jury prizes, resulted in us offering solo exhibitions at Bank Street to all winners.

For further details of this year’s Prize and Exhibition, please click here

The initial idea for the Prize was to find a context in which to show artist’s books at Bank Street in a way that encouraged their handling, perusal and inspection rather than simply seeing them as delicate objects to be placed out of reach. To encourage this looking and handling, all entries to the Prize were placed on display in the inaugural exhibition and visitors were asked to vote for their favourite entry. The winning book in 2008 was Katherine Johnson’s knitted book ‘Make’ and as part of her prize, Katherine was invited to exhibit at Bank Street in 2009. Katherine’s entry was acquired by the collection of the prestigious Centre for Print Research at the University of Western England in Bristol.

In order to try to ‘grow’ the idea in 2009 we decided to add a jury prize to both encourage participation and also produce more than one ‘winner’ – since the idea of the event was to see artists’ books on display and enjoyed rather than become the object of a competition. The winner of the public vote in 200 was ‘Bag Ladies’ by Danish art collective Artrovert and joint winners of the jury prize were Claire Tindale and Ann Rook. There was also a student prize in 2009, won by . Claire’s book Memory Loss was subsequently acquired by the Tate collection, further recognition of the importance of this initiative.

To date the prize had yielded some of our most interesting exhibitions at Bank Street, from Katherine Johnson’s delightful book sculptures to Claire Tindale’s exquisite installation. Moreover, we have been delighted to note that the exhibition of books during the prize itself has resulted in visitors really spending time looking for themselves with some spending many hours just perusing in the comfort of our gallery spaces. We have also asked entrants to donate their book to create a unique collection here at Bank Street and this has enabled us to create a resource for visitors and residents alike.

The third Sheffield Artists’ Book Prize will be held in October 2011 to again coincide with Sheffield’s Off The Shelf Festival of Reading and Writing. We are currently looking for sponsors in order to make this event even bigger and bring the wealth an richness of the artist’s book world to Sheffield and into the hands of the visiting public.