Lone Veriup - Externalities

Externalities (2025) responds to our distance from the origins of the products we consume and to the human and environmental costs that are excluded from view. Drawing on the economic concept of externalities and a reflection by Anni Albers on the ease of simply opening a package without thinking of what made it possible, the work considers what is sacrificed for everyday convenience. The artist uses their own worn out clothing and offcuts from sewing projects to create paper pulp, slowing the logic of fast fashion into a materially dense and reflective practice.

The work is realised as an edition of four unique, textured artist books. Each volume is formed through slow, haptic processes including paper making, printing, stitching and covering. Artist books occupy an unstable position between artwork and book. They invite handling, ask to be navigated through touch and encourage non sequential reading. In Externalities, this tactile encounter is central. The viewer is brought into direct bodily contact with the materiality of consumer waste and with the variable outcomes of handmade processes. The strain of paper drying, the pressure between matrix and sheet, the action of the bone folder creating sharp folds and the blade opening leaves all contribute to a charged sense of tension between fragile paper and the strength of the bound object. The edition is also in tension with conventional editioning practice, as each book is a distinct result of monoprint and hand work, with one copy clearly departing from the others.

Within the context of this exhibition, Externalities extends earlier explorations of tension coming together, first articulated in 2016 NOISNET (Tension spelt backwards), and aligns them with contemporary concerns about consumption, waste and material responsibility. By foregrounding haptic reading, material reuse and process driven experimentation, the work reflects the traditions of print and book practice cultivated through the folio box, and suggests how these traditions can inform new forms of critical, materially engaged artist books in the future.