2025 World Book Day Lecture, “Books as Mutable Creatures.”

The Centre for the Book is delighted to welcome back to campus former Printer-in-Residence Dr. Caren Florance to deliver the 2025 World Book Day Lecture, “Books as Mutable Creatures.”

Dr. Florance lives and works in Bega, NSW, within the Yuin-Monaro Nations of Australia. She is an artist and book designer/typographer, and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Canberra. Her creative doctorate explored collaboration strategies used between writers and artists. Her own creative practice, often produced under the imprint Ampersand Duck, is deeply material, using handset letterpress and other processes to explore overlaps of visual poetry and text art via artist books, zines and other print formats. She aims to present text in ways that extend gallery boundaries to intrigue and provoke the public into unsolicited reading and participation. Her artwork is collected by national and international institutions, mostly libraries. In 2019 she published a commercial visual poetry volume called Lost in Case with Cordite Books.

Her talk considers how essential book components— cover, pages, text and images— have remained the same for millennia but formats and structures have regularly changed with the times. We still recognise other technologies as ‘books’ when they are just sound, like audiobooks, or just pixels, like digital books. Over (at least) the last century books as art have wantonly raided bibliographic history to play with structure and design. This presentation will showcase some of the creative ways literature and art have intersected with books, including my own interactions with contemporary writers and artists.

The lecture will be followed at 7 pm by a group dinner at Ombrellos with $60 (2-course) and $70 (3-course) options, and a cash bar.  Those wishing to attend should notify Assoc Prof Paul Tankard as soon as possible, as places are limited.