Forthcoming Exhibitions

2011 Prize winners Elisabeth Tonnard (Jury Prize) and Clare Rogers (Student Prize) will be holding exhibitions at Bank Street Arts in July and August 2012 while main prize winner Kaho Kojima’s exhibition will be held in October alongside the Off The Shelf Festival.

Leeds Artists’s Book Fair 2012

This year we once again attended the hugely popular Leeds Artist’s Book Fair on 9-10 March at Leeds University. We hosted a stall displaying a selection of the books from our Collection. Further details can be found here.

2011 Prize Winners

After 5 weeks in the galleries at Bank Street Arts and with over 500 votes being cast in the Prize itself, Kaho Kojima’s ‘A Drop of Cloud’ was the clear winner of this year’s Prize. Around 20 books received over 20 votes and the response from visitors was tremendous so a big thanks to all those who took part.

In contrast to the public vote, in which fold out, pop up and very much ‘visual or sculptural books’ seemed to capture the imagination of visitors, the two Jury Prizes were awarded to books which were very much text based. The Winner of the Jury Prize was Elisabeth Tonnard’s ‘A Dialogue in Useful Phrases’ and the winner of the Student Prize was Clare Rogers’ ‘Inventory: A List of Everything in My Home’.

All three winners will now be offered exhibitions at Bank Street Arts in 2012 and our focus will shift from staging the Prize to these exhibitions and touring the Collection.

(Source: look again)

The Sheffield International Artist’s Book Prize is as much about finding an interesting format in which to show and view artists’ books as it is about creating a prize. The inaugural Prize was held in 2008 in an attempt to find an interesting, engaging  and innovative way to show artist’s books: one that would allow them to be handled and encourage visitors to invest time with the books and see the breadth of work on offer in this field. As a result, the Prize was free to enter and we took the stance of showing all books submitted.

We filled one of galleries at Bank Street with armchairs, sofas and cushions and displayed the books themselves with clear instructions for visitors, to look, read and participate. The inaugural Prize in 2008 attracted almost 50 entries from all over the world and paved the way for the second installment in 2009. That year we attracted over 80 entries with more coming from overseas and we added two further Prizes to the successful format whereby visitors to the exhibition are asked to be jurors of the Prize.

Due to the workload involved, to allow us to offer exhibitions to all prize winners, to raise the profile of the event and to tour the Prize to Book Fairs we took the decision to make the Prize and Exhibition a biennial event.

The 2011 Prize was our most successful to date, with over 170 entries from 22 different countries, including 45 entries for the Student Prize alone. The response from visitors to the exhibition was overwhelming and we look forward to the exhibitions and events which will follow in 2012.

2009 Winner, “Bag Ladies’ by Artrovert.

2009 Student Prize Winner, “Keepsake’ by Angie Butler.

2009 Special Jury Prize Winner, “Haiku Apple’ by Ann Rook.

2009 Special Jury Prize Winner, “Memory Loss’ by Claire Tindale.

2008 Winner ‘Make’ by Kathryn Johnson.