New library acquisitions: Summer 2025

28 July 2025

Covers of the books Susan Hiller: Working through objects and Inscription: Touch.

Navigate this page

Cover of the book Inscription: Touch, featuring eleven yellow pencils on a black-and-white, striped background.

A book made of decorative line drawings on white paper and text on transparent paper, all overlapping in a haphazard way.

A red box, opened as a book would, containing some sheets of paper and a smaller plastic box with a stone inside.

Cover of the book Deposition Layer: An Archaeology of Memory by Emii Alrai and Saad Maqbool, in black text on a grey cover.

Cover of the book Susan Hiller: Working through objects. The cover mimics grey cardboard, with two white stickers of cows and a black and white photo of archival material.

Cover of the book Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures, featuring a photo of the artist as a young woman with three of her 'Piss Flowers' sculptures.

Cover of the book Alfred Stevens: Master of Design 1817-1875 by Teresa Sladen. The cover features a painting of two male and one female figures.

Cover of the book Paule Vezelay: Living Lines, with the text over a painting of several colourful sculptural lines that look quite organic in nature.

Cover of the book Delusions of Grandeur: Grayson Perry, with a colourful and chaotic collaged cover.

Cover of the book Mirror Mirror by Michael Petry, with a photo of Jeff Koons' Balloon Dog in metallic blue on a light blue, reflective cover.

Cover of the book Phyllida Barlow: In the Studio, with a photo of the artist in her studio on an orange cover.

Cover of the book Anna Boghiguian, with red text spilling playfully down the blue cover.

Cover of the book Elizabeth Catlett, with an image of a woman's head looking in three directions, printed in black on an orange background.

Cover of the book Meštrović: A Retrospective, featuring a photo of a bronze sculpture of a man screaming on a mustard-yellow background.

Cover of the book Her Unstable Materials, with the text in black over a collaged pink background.

Cover of the book Ornamental Blackness by Adrienne L. Childs, featuring a photo of a colourfully painted sculpture of a black woman carrying a basket on her head supported by one arm, and a feathered fan in her left hand.

Cover of the book Barbara Hepworth: Strings, featuring a close-in photo of a curved wooden sculpture with strings stretched across, similar to a musical instrument.

Cover of the book Black Earth Rising. It features a photo of birds in flight above an abstract painted landscape.

Cover of the book Camille Claudel & Bernhard Hoetger: Emancipation from Rodin, featuring photos of two figurative sculptures.

Cover of the book Delcy Morelos, featuring a photo of what looks like casts of fruit or vegetables arranged in two rows.

Cover of the book Discovering Women Sculptors, featuring a photo of a female sculptor working on a stone carving of a nude man and woman dancing.

Cover of the book Do Ho Suh, with large embossed letters on a red cover.

Cover of the book Food, featuring a photo of supermarket shelves as the cover, with a list of essays, conversations and works on top.

Cover of the book Ian McKeever: Against Architecture.

Cover of the book In Her Hands: Bildhauerinnen Des Surrealismus, featuring a photo of an abstract sculpture of two people, their heads melting and reaching out to each other as long tendrils.

Cover of the book James Lee Byars: Days in Detroit, written in gold outline on a red cover.

Cover of the book Medardo Rosso: Inventing Modern Sculpture, featuring a close-up photo of a very weathered head of a sculpture.

Cover of the book Michelangelo Pistoletto: Figuration and Cultural Politics by Tenley Bick.

Cover of the book Oceans. The cover features a photo of what looks like blue ink that has been dripped into clear water, with red and yellow shapes collages on top.

Cover of the book Paula Chambers: Still. Stray. Stowaway, with black text on a pink cover.

Cover of the book Post War Revisited: A Global Art History, in red text on a tan background. The years 1945 to 1965 are each printed over the top in a ghostly white.

Cover of the book Resource Hungry, in yellow and black text on a grey background.

Cover of the book Riflemaker Becomes Indica, with a collaged photo of men standing around mimicking model poses.

Cover of the book Sèvres Extraordinaire!, featuring a white plaster or marble sculpture of a woman in a dress on a navy blue cover.

Cover of the book Les portes du rêve, with pink and white text on a blue background, and a drawing of a pink fish with the word 'Surrealism' on it.

Cover of the book Sussex Modernism by Hope Wolf, featuring a painting of a landscape littered with 'T' shaped sculptures.

Cover of the book Unfolding Structures of Exchange, with dark grey text on a light grey background.

Cover of the book What is Truth?, with black and white text in a graffiti-stencilled font on a pink background.

Cover of the book William Cobbing: Social Substance, featuring an image of a crudely made clay sculpture of a face, with blue and yellow paint dripping from the eyes and mouth.

Cover of the book Thinking with the Harrisons by Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle. The cover image features two men, rendered in miniature, working at architectural drawings on large metallic desks.

Cover of the book Lubaina Himid: Make Do and Mend, with a photo of someone restoring a piece of furniture by delicately painting a wooden leg.

Cover of the book grime, glitter & glass by Nikki A. Green, with a photo of a sculpture of a black heart inside a domed glass container.

Cover of the book Climate Action in the Art World by Annabel Keenan, in lime green and white text on a dark green cover.

Cover of the book Artists and the Practice of Agriculture by Silvia Bottonelli, in the Critical Food Studies series by Routledge.

Cover of the book Aqueous Humours: Fluid Ground, in an amorphous, pink font on a textured, pink and black cover.

PAGES Artists’ Book Fair, held every year in the spring in Leeds, is a fantastic opportunity to view a wonderful variety of artists’ books and visiting always inspires new acquisitions for the library collection.

We look for publications which reflect our focus on sculpture, including works which connect with landscape and conceptual art. This summer we added works by Rachel Smith and Frances Day, Julia Mckinley, Emii Alrai, Michael O’Shea, Caroline Bergvall, Susan Hiller, Sharon Kivland and Paul Buck on subjects as diverse as encounters with museum objects and the sensory, political, and cultural significance of materials.

We have also recently added to the library Inscription: The Journal of Material Text – Theory, Practice, History. The editors Simon Morris, Gill Partington and Adam Smyth work with artists, printmakers, writers and designers to combine photography and artworks with academic texts on different topics each volume. Issue 4 is devoted to the subject of touch, a topic we have been exploring in relation to artworks in preparation for our November exhibition, Beyond the Visual.

The journal is published by Information as Material and Leeds Beckett University in a limited edition as a striking, multimedia physical copy and as a freely available online version: inscriptionjournal.com

Issue 4 includes a reproduction of Robert Rauschenberg’s and John Cage’s Automobile Tire Print (1953) linking articles on subjects ranging from nineteenth-century books for the blind to Hansjörg Mayer’s haptic books.