The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it - for PROOF! 2023

Sarah Bodman and Roelof Bakker are undertaking a mail art collaboration to produce a body of work for exhibition / artist's book. Along the way we will document and reflect upon our practice to produce written text for an article that will examine our inspirations, interaction and outcomes. We don't know yet where our collaboration will take us.
We are using collage and mail art as a means to explore instructions from Paul Thek's manifesto directed by a statement by James Baldwin: The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.
We will be asking questions and making work responding to that statement by low-fi means: cutting, glueing, posting, etc inventing, our ‘place’, one that as yet does not exist (our utopia?).
Can we make a space unique for us, a place of (visual) debate and knowledge-sharing?
APPROACH Re (use) Re(order) Re(purpose) Re(print) Re(interpret) Re(form) Re(frame) Re (make) Re(build) Re(cycle) Re(transform) Re(create) Re(steal) Re(write) Re(appropriate) Re(narrate) etc.
Some of our questions to each other are:
What is your place in the world?
Where is your place in the world?
How much time do you spend in nature?
Do you feel alienated from wilderness?
What are the birds saying?
Are you an activist and feminist maker, destroyer, doer?
What are your hopes and dreams?
What do you dream of when you sleep? Where do you go?
What does it mean to be a human now?
How do you engage with ideas of post-colonialism?
What is art-making to you?
What is reading to you?
What do words mean to you?
Do you think rules should be broken?
What rules would you set?
Are you willing to accept change?
Can we change anything?
Our collaboration is taking place via the postal service June-December 2023 with an aim to produce a body of work for exhibition and an artist's book in early 2024.
Sarah Bodman is an artist and researcher at CFPR/UWE, Programme Leader for MA Multidisciplinary Printmaking, editor of the Artist's Book Yearbook, Book Arts Newsletter and The Blue Notebook journal for artists’ books. Recent artworks include Read With Me - the result of a performative drawing event, readings by a psychometric reader, collages and words assembled from dissected readings. www.bookarts.u...
Roelof Bakker is a Hastings-based artist and writer originally from the Netherlands, living in the UK since 1984 and graduating in 2019 with an MA Fine Art from Cambridge School of Art. Discovering the potential of the juxtaposition of image, text and form is what drives his practice while responding to contemporary social issues and historical events. Work in development addresses queerness and nature and ecological collapse.
rbakker.com/