Guest Artist - Alexandra Huddleston

Our guest artist this month is Alexandre Huddleston, a landscape artist, and photographer, whose work is transformed into many types of art but specifically into artist Books. Here she answers our questions about her career as an artist.

Bio

 Alexandra Huddleston is a photographer, writer, and walking artist. Her recent works move the viewer through time and space, expressing what it’s like to be walking within an ever-changing landscape.  Born in Freetown, Sierra Leone and raised in Bethesda, Maryland, USA, and Bamako, Mali, her upbringing has led her to explore landscape and culture from an international and interdisciplinary perspective.  Between 2009 and 2014, she walked thousands of kilometers on pilgrimage in Spain, France, and Japan – journeys that led to her current walking art practice.

Alexandra presents her work to the public through books, exhibitions, and lectures.  Her books are collected in libraries around the world, including the British Library, the Brooklyn Museum, Harvard University’s Hutchins Center Library, New York University’s Bobst Library, and University of Cape Town’s Oppenheimer Library.  As creative director and co-founder of the Kyoudai Press, Alexandra’s major publications include ‘Lost Things’ (2012), ‘333 Saints: A Life of Scholarship in Timbuktu’ (2013), ‘East or West’ (2014), ‘Vertigo’ (2016), ‘Traces of Time’ (2022), and ‘A Walk in the Park’ (2023).

Links

Website: https://www.alexandrahuddleston.com

Instagram: @adh2103

A short preface:  My responses focus on the part of my practice involving bookmaking and self-publishing because they will be published at the same time as the Artist’s Book Issue.  I also make wall-based work, murals, and installations…and a different focus would lead me to give different answers.

1 – What lead you to, or what was your journey to this path in the creative industries? Where did it all begin.  

My path to becoming a photographer certainly began on my sixth Christmas, when I was given my first camera, a polaroid.  Not long after that, my family moved to Bamako, Mali.  My parents were diplomats.  From then on, I always had a camera, and I took photos and made albums of all places we lived, including Haiti, Madagascar, and Cuba.  Photography was my way to see more clearly and understand more deeply the unfamiliar people and places around me.

The path of my artistic practice has since gone through various twists and turn.  Early on, I worked as a documentary photographer.  Now, I’m a walking artist and conceptual landscape photographer.  However, the core of what I do hasn’t changed since I was six: I use the camera to research the world around me, and then I make books from what I learn!

I would like to add that my early documentary work on the traditional Islamic scholarship of Timbuktu was a pivotal experience that cemented my fascination with books, in particular with ancient manuscripts and hand-made books.  For a year I lived inside the Fondo Kati – a private manuscript library – and every day I interviewed and photographed scholars who both conserved and studied century-old manuscripts…it’s easy to get a bit obsessed in the process of all that.

2 –  Do you think the creative industry is relevant, and explain why? 

Absolutely.  Visual art might not change the world, but it moves people who then go on to affect change.  At their best, the arts have the power to provide solace and to renew our strength and courage.  They can deepen our understanding and expand our perceptions.  They complicate and pry open ingrained ways of thinking.

That said, just as not all change is good, not all art inspires a positive change or enlightened understanding!  Throughout the centuries, the visual arts have also been used to reinforce oppressive power systems and negative stereotypes.  Nonetheless, both its positive and negative power of influence underscores how and why the creative industries are so relevant.

3 – If you could own one piece of artwork no matter the cost, or type, what would it be and why?

I would love to be given the privilege of looking at all the pages of the Book of Kells, in person, at my leisure.  I’m more than happy for the manuscript to remain in the custody of the Trinity College Library, but it would be fantastic to be able to actually see every single page and part of it, including the cover and end sheets!

Manuscripts and artist’s books suffer from the same problem when it comes to the tension between conservation and public presentation.  In general, if you’ve ‘seen’ an artist’s book or manuscript in a museum or gallery, all you’ve ‘seen’ is one page spread, because the object is too fragile and precious to allow much handling.

And yet, I know first-hand as a maker of artist’s books, that often the full impact of a work will not be communicated unless the viewer moves through it page by page, from beginning to end…and then, ideally, returns to the beginning to looks through it all once again, while letting the revelations sink-in.

4 – What would your advice be to someone wanting to venture into the creative industries today?

On a creative level, my advice is to hone one medium to the point of mastery.  Yes, along the way it’s fine to experiment, and I’m all for multidisciplinary work.  However, mastering one medium will actually make you more articulate in any of the others you choose to adopt later on.

On a professional level, my advice is to build friendships with talented fellow artists whose work you respect.  Such a network will support and inspire you creatively, professionally, and personally.  And, make sure that those friends are not all using the same primary medium as you.  Your community will be more stimulating and less competitive if its members have unique and diverse artistic voices.

5- If you could go back 10-20 years what would you tell your younger self?

Ha! We all make mistakes in life that we regret…but, when it comes to my creative path, most of my ‘mistakes’ and detours were actually essential to the recent breakthroughs I’ve had in my career.  For me, life experience has been a far more effective teacher than any human being, so how could I tell my younger self to avoid it all?

I’d like to tell my younger self to have more self-confidence.  But there again, I know that telling someone to have more confidence doesn’t change anything.  True self-confidence comes from an inner change, outer voices only affect a superficial sense of contentment.

6 – In 5 - 10 years’ time what do you hope to have done or not done within your career?

Well, this is your most difficult question, because my most honest answer would be a long list of professional opportunities and accomplishments that I have yet to achieve.  I’m quite ambitious!  But, that would be pretty boring for the readers.

However, as an artist who makes books, I would like to find ways to get my books in front of a wider audience.  At this time, when I make a small edition of hand-made books like “Traces of Time,” I’ll be lucky if a hundred people see the actual work.  Reaching a wider audience might mean working with an established publisher to make larger editions of some of my books.  It might also mean creating high-quality videos of viewing a book page by page, videos that can be exhibited in a gallery space.  Another solution might be to make more books in formats (like the scroll or accordion book) that can function as installations as well as hand-held works.  However, one reason that I make hand-bound artist’s books to begin with is because I am a perfectionist.  So, the main difficulty will be to reach a wider audience while respecting my desire to create a perfect work!