AustLit

Designated the third part of the Botanikos Project, A Common Sense of Nature comprises colour photographs, colour illustrations and text by Oppen. The work is an artist’s book on the local environment of Sydney, while demonstrating the deficiencies of our language to pin-point the true beauty, complexities and eccentricities the natural world.

The seventh part of Monica Oppen's Botanikos project, From the City into Trees comprises images and graphics by Oppen, along with text extracts from Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places (2007) and Tony Jupiter's What has Nature Ever Done for Us?: How Money Really Does Grow on Trees (2013). This work and the related work Night-Walker, were influenced by a hand drawn creation created by Oppen at art school in 1989.

This work is the sixth part of the Oppen's Botanikos project. Designed and illustrated (some illustrations coloured) by Oppen, the text extracts are from The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane (2007). Night-Walker and From the City into Trees were influenced by a hand drawn creation Oppen did while at art school in 1989.

This is the second book of the Botanikos project. The work covers the relationship between human philosophy/life and plants and the overall effect that nature has on the human life. Oppen produces photographs of botanic gardens and the sky, and uses select texts from Michael Marder's Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (2013) to explore human life's dependency on the ‘green world’.

Produced in the form of a clam shell box, Possession - Dispossession 'began with the painted book. The text is extracts from William Bradley's journal (A Voyage to New South Wales.). Bradley was one of the officers on the first fleet under the command of Arthur Phillip, which arrived in what is now known as Sydney Harbour in January 1788. Their intention was to establish a convict colony. Bradley was involved with the surveying of the harbour. In essence this surveying, seemingly harmless, was key in the process of possession and dispossession. The box is essentially a trompe l'oeil suggesting a particular reality but revealing another' (Monica Oppen, Bibliotheca Librorum apud Artificem catalogue).

This work features text from a book by W.A.W de Beuzeville, an avid forest ecologist and the author of Australian Trees for Australian Planting (1947). Through this text, Oppen reworks passionate feelings against deforestation and the environmental degradation that comes with it. In chosen texts, Beuzeville also talks of land areas needing to escape from the busy-ness of the industrialised human life. The work features relief prints that expose the horizon as being a harsh, barren line. Through this work Oppen pushes her love for the sacred natural world, and her fear of human life destroying it (and in turn, inevitably destroying itself).

In this paper, first presented at the the 2014 Codex Australia 2014, Monica Oppen talks the impilses that drove her make books and the challenges she encountered.

White gloves are stitched to printed sheets so when the reader pulls them on, they realise that they are attached to the pages. The five texts that are featured in the work contain the stunted and embittered parts of communication in a relationship. This work invites the reader/viewer to connect themselves (both physically and emotionally) to the relationship they discover through the texts.

Produced for the exhibition 'Lesson in History II: Democracy,' this art book is 'about the vote or choice of the people. In this book the word DEMOCRACY is tagged with myriad words both positive and negative that have become linked to democracy and the political and democratic process in Australia. There is a voting sheet included so a vote can be taken of those for or against democracy' (Monica Oppen, Bibliotheca Librorum apud Artificem catalogue).

Comprising pictures and letterpress printing, this art book was created and produced for the inventory of Al-Mutanabbi Street- a street located in Baghdad, Iraq. Considered the the heart and soul of the Baghdad literary and intellectual community, it was bombed in March 2007. San Francisco poet and activist Beau Beausoleil developed and promoted numerous projects commemorating the street Al-Mutanabbi Street. One of these, the Al-Mutanabbi Street Inventory, was a call to poets, writers and artists from around the world to produce a series of letterpress printed broadsides in response to the bombing and to reflect on the healing process.

Published by Ant Press for Bibliotheca Librorum apud Artificem, The Silent Scream 'presents, not only a companion catalogue to an exhibition held at Monash University Rare Books, but also a journey through some of humanity's most inhumane and hypocritical moments. Reaching back to William Blake with a facsimile of his illuminated book America : A Prophecy then travelling through the two world wars and on to the modern era the catalogue provides insights into 77 influential books and works presented in book form.... For the first time in Australia the work of Australian artists and writers working in the field of bookarts have been placed into a context with an international and historical perspective. Each book has been profiled with images and an accompanying commentary. Monica Oppen and Peter Lyssiotis, both practicing artists, lend their unique perspective to the social content and the techniques behind the production of these books' (Bibliotheca Librorum Apud Artificem website).

Oppen responds to a suite of images, a proof of a book which has never been finished given to her by Lyssiotis. Finding the images brutal and confronting rather than throwing the work away she writes her response questioning how far has feminism got us if someone can still nonchalantly produce images such as these. The coda text about patriarchy is from Grace King’s tumblr stream and was used with permission. This book focuses on keeping open discussion about women, feminism, the patriarchy, media and the overall possibility of gender equality in our present and future societies.

'The most powerful way to breakdown stereotypes is by asking questions, by keeping discussion alive. Only then can we move towards a new reality' (Monica Oppen, Bibliotheca Librorum apud Artificem catalogue).

The second edition was produced in the style and with the materiality of a famous magazine. The images were taken from a selection of women's magazines, notably Harper’s Bazar.

Oppen reflects on the way in which we as people can struggle to represent the planet. Both maps and words and images can only ever show fragments.

'To make this book, I've taken an old school atlas and cut out the map pages and refolded them and stitched them together in a away that there is no beginning or end. The book is circular. The sections can be unfolded. The small photographic images are from another book about life on earth. All organic forms. An atlas is a representation of the planet. We struggle constantly to capture the planet in a form we can understand' (Monica Oppen, Bibliotheca Librorum apud Artificem catalogue).

'This work comes from four incidents where I noticed women crying, while travelling on public transport. I remember one incident specifically, where a women was talking on her mobile phone and muffling her crying. As far as I could work out it was a relationship break up. It is one of the strange things about mobile phones that private life suddenly has become public. However I also get caught out, reading a sad passage in a book and wiping away the tears' (Monica Oppen, Bibliotheca Librorum apud Artificem catalogue).

Working on the same set of sheets as Dark Forest but collated and folded differently a new text has been overlaid" (Monica Oppen, Bibliotheca Librorum apud Artificem catalogue).