A Forest of Books

Beech//Book by MANUAL

When I get interested in a subject, I end up going on a deep dive through various books about that subject. Not in a well-thought-out syllabus, but in the sense of “Oh, this thing I just read makes me curious about this other little thing”—a snaky approach that gets me in the vicinity of the thing I’m trying to learn, but that is just as likely to lead me down a tangential path. But in their multi-year project about trees, BEECH//BOOK: an emblematic pairing, Ed Hill and Suzanne Bloom have focused their library on tree-ish subjects.

Bloom and Hill call their collaboration MANUAL. They have been producing artworks together since the mid-70s. The duration of their partnership is reflected in the subject matter of BEECH//BOOK. They’ve been together long enough that trees they planted have grown up. In the publication that accompanies the exhibit, MANUAL write:

At first we didn’t pay close attention to the beech trees in our forest. They seemed young and were outnumbered by groves of maple, birch, ash, and white pine, more like waves of saplings on the forest floor.

Five-decades later we see the beeches as they really are. Opportunistic, yes, but also tough and very elegant with wonderfully smooth (though often scarred) platinum gray bark, frequently the perfect medium for lover’s inscriptions.

This exhibit is the story of MANUAL diving down the rabbit hole of books about trees. They, like me, respond to things that are important to them by reading books about those things.

MANUAL divide this exhibit into six parts, about which they write, “The six separate groups of images function like chapters, their pages set within the books leaves, and it’s binding.” This metaphor—the exhibit is a book—is also reflected in the contents, where the metaphor for a beech is a book. Manual even make a list of analogous parts of a book and a tree: Trunk=spine, growth rings=chapters, forest=library, nursery=bookstore, etc.

MANUAL, Reading the Family of Man, archival pigment print, suite of 12