Piece of Paper Press is delighted today to publish SHITFLOWERS by Pete Smith in a numbered limited edition of 250 copies – the forty-fifth title in the series. Since 2019, Smith has been using his phone camera to photograph bird droppings on Hackney pavements, posting them on Instagram as ‘Shitflowers’. Smith has long used found forms in his painting and collage work, but for me, the casual and prosaic mode of the ‘Shitflowers’ epitomise a key aspect (part flâneur, part urban beachcomber) of Smith’s lived practice as an artist, while the formally repetitive imagery suggested collection in book form.
Pete Smith says:
When I posted the first Shitflower, I hadn’t envisaged a series but was glad to be noticing these fugitive expressions, soon erased by rain or footfall. I doubt the artist birds are intentional or conscious of their often graceful work, but a little part of me would like to think so.
The photo above is Pete’s, taken from a first floor room overlooking Russell Square in Bloomsbury, central London. We spent an enjoyable afternoon last week folding, stapling and trimming the books, while chatting about this and that: a social facet of the Piece of Paper Press production process that was necessarily dropped during the Covid pandemic, but which it has been a pleasure to reintroduce.
Piece of Paper Press is an artists’ book project founded in 1994. The project was designed as a low-tech, sustainable format to commission and publish new writings, visual and graphic works by artists and writers. Each miniature copy is made from a single A4 sheet that is printed on both sides and then folded, stapled and trimmed by hand to create the book. There is no schedule; titles are published when they are ready. Piece of Paper Press titles are always given away free, and usually produced in an edition of 150. Fifty copies are distributed by the contributor, and around a hundred to the press’s slowly evolving mailing list, which is gradually being displaced by the growing number of past contributors. Remaining copies are added to the project’s archive.
Read the press release here:
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