Tracey Bush - Books

Tracey Bush has produced an ongoing series of artist's books based on the River Thames. Tracey's books have been collected by many National and International collections, including the Tate Gallery Library, the Yale Centre for British Art, Connecticut, Winchester School of Art Library, Manchester Metropolitan University Library, the Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Visual and Concrete Poetry, Miami, and the Jaffe Collection at the Florida Atlantic University. Tracey was also commissioned in 2007 by Barbican Education to create a book which was presented to HRH The Queen.

The initial series of embossed maps of the Thames are now mostly out of print, but they included the publication 'London's Lost Rivers' which explored the ghostly traces of these ancient watercourses revealed in the names of the City's streets.More recent publications, under the imprint Fathom Five Books have included 'The Thames pH Book' (2001) a multiple of tiny litmus paper books which are dipped page by page in river water. The water was collected with the help of the Environment Agency. The river journey is encapsulated in a rubber-stamped list of locations, combined with the physical water traces.

The large publication 'River Stairs' was completed in 2002 and explores the Thames river stairs through the City and Docklands. The original photographs in the book are printed using flexography, and were created at the Centre for Fine Print Research at the University of the West of England in Bristol.

In the London Artists Book Fair 2007, Tracey Bush was awarded a Birgit Skiold Memorial Prize for the 'British Butterflies Stamp Album' (2004) One of the judges was Stephen Bury who described my winning book in his Breaking the Rules Blog: 'Tracey Bush's work marries conceptualism with an almost crafts process: her butterflies, made from maps of their locations, reference the books used for their identification, atlases as well as having 'pages'. There's a powerful valency here.'