The structure and materiality of the artist book are central to how Tamsin’s work takes shape, with by-products and left-over materials often used to create new works. She established manual.editions in 2021 to explore environmental approaches to book-making through research, discussion and making. MNL activities currently include publishing her own work in book form, lending books through an artist book library and hosting a community called the Sustainable Photobook Publishing (SPP) network. The network shares open-source research and practical resources as well as organising talks, exhibitions and workshops.
Tamsin’s published books include Born of the Purest Parents (Self-published: 2018), a research into the landscape, cultural history and science of salt, this is how the earth must see itself: a walk with natural features (manual.editions: 2021), where the Ordnance Survey mapping system and symbols are used as a guide to explore the British landscape, and walking out of sleep: encounters with lichen territory (manual.editions: 2023), a book of multiple layers, that reflect the symbiotic organism and the environmental conditions that they require to survive.
There is a conscious smallness to her publishing both in the physical size of the books and the edition sizes, which have ranged from 35-120 books. She assembles and binds all of the books by hand, working with local materials and processes. In 2021 she started to make deconstructed wall-mounted book objects as a way of reusing test prints that would usually be discarded. Installed open and uncovered, the paper is free to respond to the environment; creasing, curling, absorbing moisture and picking up fingerprints through encouraged handling. Publishing is a point in time, beyond which her work evolves into installations. Her exhibitions often interweave large scale prints with artefacts of her bookmaking practice. This pairing reflects both her iterative process of working in the landscape and examining the findings within the medium of the book, as well as her experience of encountering the land in glimpses and fragments of varying scale.
