MA Fine Art students celebrate the launch of their art book ahead of its move to the TATE Britain

Four MA Fine Art students from the University of Northampton have raised the funds they need to be able to publish their own art book that will now be housed in the special collections library at the TATE Britain.

Elaine Elcoat, Suzanne Ballinger, Mimi Tobot and Elizabeth Tomas, along with their lecturers, Catriona Leahy and Craig Staff will be holding a book launch at the University’s Avenue Gallery on Thursday 23 March at 5:30pm.

The students and lecturers started to develop the art book when away at an artist’s residency at the Frans Masereel Centrum in Belgium which focuses on printmaking.

The material was produced, created and collated over the course of the week-long residency and the students have visited and consulted with Book Works, a prestigious London-based book publisher, on the format of the book.

The finished book; Time, Chemistry, Chance and Human Design, is hand-bound with a hard case and will be included in the impressive catalogue of artists’ books in the special collections library at the TATE Britain.

To raise the funds they needed to produce and publish the book, the students created a limited edition box set of prints from their own work – an edition of 40 sets – called Traces, which was launched in April 2016 and raised over £2,000 for the cost of the art book.

Elizabeth Tomas commented: “This experience has been so beneficial to us on many levels. The opportunity to undertake a research residency of this nature is, in and of itself, an unusual privilege and particularly to work at such a prestigious institution as Frans Masereel.

“The whole environment was so inspiring and a fantastic impetus for making creative work. The whole process of fundraising, making saleable editions of prints as a collaborative team, and attending the publisher Book Works to negotiate a final published work has been an eye-opening and incredibly enriching experience.

“Following on from this to have the opportunity to leave a legacy of the project at the TATE Britain is frankly unreal, I am still not sure it has entirely sunk in.”

Find out more about the Traces fundraising project from last year