Description

‘Coracle Press: A Table in Ballybeg’ was created by Ireland-based artists, Simon Cutts and Erica Van Horn.  This book has been published in a very limited edition run of 250 copies. Made at the time of the epidemic lockdown in all of Europe, but where life in the artists’ valley was much as it usually is, but with no visitors. Simon Cutts and Erica Van Horn endured almost a year of making and eating their own food, with no abatement. No cafés to visit. No tables to travel to.They live in a suspension of the past and of the imagined future, and a time when they hang up the apron, if only temporarily. Erica rarely writes about food, but this books contains a few interleaving texts from her journal.

About Coracle Press

Coracle Press is a small and completely individual publishing press which has been operating for over 35 years..  Writer and artist Erica
Van Horn and poet, artist and editor Simon Cutts, direct it now from a small
farm between the hills of South Tipperary, Ireland. They have been there since 1996. However, they began in London in the nineteen seventies, as publisher, gallery,
and a space for books. Their last London book shop project project was ‘workfortheeyetodo’  in the mid-nineteen nineties. They also had a Norfolk connection. They worked out of a studio in Docking and between 1989-2012, printing many of their works from a printer, Crome and Akers, based in King’s Lynn.

From their remote spot in Ireland, they continue as printer-publisher, editor of
spaces. They describe their practice as ’employing many of the devices and formats of hypothetical
publishing inherent in the small press’.  Their books have both critical and playful
dimensions. But they are also steeped in poetry – they call it a residue of poetry – concerned with the mechanisms of the book as a manifestation of the poem
itself. They are also mindful of their many collaborations  with other artists and writers, which evade any clear category.

Being open to new ideas and approaches marks all their projects. Limiting their scope or over-categorising their content or defining their range does not interest them.
The books themselves are not so concerned with craft tradition,
limited-ness of edition, hand-made paper or elaboration of binding. While each one has its unique character and appearance, what they want to achieve is the plain and simple case-bound book, the sewn paperback. They are working constantly at extending the category of ephemera. Making quirky visions, askance views, eccentric perceptions widely available is what they are all about.

Visit their blog at www.somewordsforlivinglocally.com