The Living Cliff by Gin Rimmington Jones

Another undoubted highlight from this year's visit to Peckham's A Bigger Book Fair was discovering the work of Gin Rimmington Jones.

I was instantly drawn to the beautifully detailed construction of her handmade books.

Browsing through them, I initially passed them by, primarily because I am generally not a landscape collector.

However, as is often the way, as I continued around the fair, I could not get the work out of my mind.

I am often asked what it is that convinces me to buy work by artists that are new to me.

Well this is a perfect example and I still can't give a definitive answer.

What I do know is, that from the countless books and zines on offer and clamouring for attention, some shout louder.

The Living Cliff is a very special piece.

Featuring richly toned monochrome images captured on a small section of England's Cornish coast, this hypnotic work is - in many ways - a form of portraiture.

The portrait of land through time.

These are not wide open vistas and rolling hillsides, the glorious wonder of the Big Country.

These are closely cropped details each imbued with detail and personality, presented without the colour that would normally bring images such as these into an energetic and vibrant visual salsa of a performance. Instead they perform a dark monochrome tango, a slow and sensual sequence of steps and movements, intentions expressed through a natural non-verbal conversation.

A promise of silence and secrets.

These abstract monoliths observed in the Cornish coastal landscape, wear the scars of time.

Crags and ridges.

Frowns and wrinkles.

The legacy of eons and the elements.

Bushy eyebrows and droopy moustaches.

Fringes and cascades.

A curtain of green falling in swathes - literally - across the rock face.

Nature’s ultimate comb over.

Rimmington Jones regularly escapes to such locations, her documentation of the coast a solitary pursuit.

A meditative quest for peace in a world full of noise and confusion.

And its allure is infectious.

So why this book?

To look at a study of petrology through the eyes of the artist and see romance and danger. The portrait of a cliff hundreds of millions of years old, atop which civilisations have ebbed and flowed, ultimately blown away like the seeds of a dandelion, if they are lucky, to rise again in a continuous cycle.

All the while the rock endures, its expressions and moods shaped by time and tide.

Produced in a very limited edition of just twenty five copies, each is handmade by the artist.

The details of it design and construction compliments the photography perfectly.

Before we the book in earnest an image loosely tipped to the front free endpaper.

The warm textural Munken Pure Rough paper adding to the sensory delight and open spine hand stitched binding in itself - perhaps - an allusion to the rock strata that inspired the work itself.

Why? 

That is why.

The Living Cliff is handmade in an edition of 25 signed and numbered copies.

https://www.ginrimmingtonjones.com/project/the-living-cliff