A Book
by Mette Norrie
The pause as a visual poem
In 2017, I started the project Book on pauses at a residency in Jutland, DK, based on some loose ideas and sketches. I had previously made works that combined text and drawing and wanted to explore this field further and found that the subject of pauses, something we are all familiar with, but rarely acknowledge, could be an interesting theme for a longer work.
During the short residency, I ended up with approximately 80 pages of lyrical sentences and minimalistic pen drawings in which there is often added a surreal dream-like element to otherwise mundane everyday objects. I used an excerpt from the project for some zines when I got home, but besides that, it was mostly put aside due to other projects for quite a while. Still, I hadn’t forgotten the book, and some years later, during the pandemic lockdowns in 2020–21 I revisited it and got the idea to make two versions of the book; one in Danish and one in English to widen the possibility of reaching a larger audience, even though I’m aware that a genre like visual poetry is still considered fairly small. Furthermore, I decided a new order for the pages and added around 20 more so that the book would end up on 100 pages.
Additionally, I had founded my own small press September Press in 2018 aimed at book projects like these and during the spring of 2022 some funding finally made it possibly to start the printing process and publish a limited edition of 100 copies for each version in June.
I think of the result as an illustrated meditation on the nature of pauses; a book that explores the pause in its many different forms in a tone which blends melancholy and humour and tries to identify the complexity of the theme in a way that is hopefully both surprising and evocative.
About the artist
Mette Norrie (b. 1984 in Nivå, Denmark) is a visual artist and author based in Copenhagen, Denmark. She holds an MFA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and works in the fields of expanded drawing, visual poetry and literary writing. In 2018 she started the Micro Press September Press where she publishes her art books and zines.
