This series is part of an ongoing project about paper and how we use and see it. These particular works look at books and the information stored in them and how we view or read them. The first book was the 18th Century Japanese Dictionary which, by my ignorance, was photographed upside down. This then led onto other books being inversed and reading aids to correct them. It is a light-hearted representation of printed paper but with a serious undertone. In an increasingly electronic world , especially with the e book readers such as the iPad, we are losing our sense of the book itself Ð the paper, the ink, the impressed text, the binding and just the sense of it being an object. This loss of 'objectness' of the book is a real concern to me as we will lose out to inferior experiences of the electronic page. The great thing about books is that you can tell instantly how much information is stored, how it has been used, loved or unloved, marked or annotated with important phrases or passages which the reader has found to be important to them. This cannot be replicated with e books however smart they become. The decline in great book cover can never be replaced or cherished by those who judge books by their covers. As with the art of letter writing, books could become a distant memory. So these photographs are like 'museum relics' of a long lost age in publishing.

Bill Jackson 2010

Three images of books held in position by laboratory clamps are the subject of an experiment involving what we see and what we think is seen. They are Dantes 'Inferno', a Japanese dictionary, and 'The Origin of Species'. Forming a series simply called 'Books' these images are more than the sum of their parts. A pair of spectacles held before Dantes 'Inferno' shows the latin text in the left lens to be distorted but regularly upright whereas the text viewed by the right lens is similarly distorted but upside down. We are thus suspended in our own disbelief in hell. If the Japanese dictionary was placed in an upright position it's readability would be confusing to the Western eye. So now that it is placed upside down it becomes a measure of our own complete confusion. The last book subject here is 'The Origin of Species'. Again held upside down the text is focused in one specific area by means of a magnifying glass. The corrected and legible text in this lens reveals the words '- been developed - and under many - imaginary - probable - have been - forms, for taking - on the land and in'. As a random poem it is thought provoking enough, but read in context of Bill Jackson's 'Inside and Out' it would seem to draw several circles around, whilst underlining several works for sure, of all the works shown in this great exhibition.

SImon Head