Monochrome, Paperback, 210 x 148mm, 84pp

Small gestures of endurance presents Rachel Smith’s singular reading of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse — an archive of associations; a layering and folding of domestic histories; a valuing of polite embroidered surfaces to distract from the smell of fag ash and swampy vase water; a process of fighting the creeping doubts handed down and across generations; an insolent but smitten neurodiverse reading; a noticing of minute movements.

This beautiful book offers multiple layers and un-foldings: literary, domestic, botanical, feminist... Pages turning as linen might be folded and unfolded... Evocative traces of flowers neatly embroidered by unseen hands, the labour of the domestic; polishing, turning phrases, weaving words that settle like sunlight on dust. Dog roses as dog ears crease.

— Sarah Bodman

A sublime work of association, of brave punctuated lines that join and break and join again, accompanied by the abstraction afforded by the folding and unfolding and folding of cloth, precisely. Smith’s book-loom, her book-room, weaves words as text and textile. Mysterious and familiar at the same time, it opens, closes, opens, as a very good book should.

—Sharon Kivland

A powerful work of resistance… It is a highly original multi-vocal work which questions, proposes, and instructs as we fold, unfold, and fold again into a Woolf-like blend of heightened consciousness and meandering introspection. Smith invites us to consider what it means to be an ‘I’, what it means to roam through spaces where nothing and all is concealed, and how through dislocation the art and artist emerges. Smith has done it again – a visual poetic delight which will have you circling back.

—Karenjit Sandhu