A Little Found Found is a poem of colour and movement. It explores the significance of colour through a narrative of repetition with variations, moving between names and qualities of colour, and corresponding ideas.

As a journey through ideas and acts of finding, the structure of A Little Found Found is based on Jerome Rothenberg’s poem ‘A Little Boy Lost,’ expanding its reference to the interplay between black and white in William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. A Little Found Found also references Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Blake experience,’ in which he claimed to have heard Blake’s voice reading poems to him, including ‘The Little Girl Lost,’ with whose central figure Ginsberg felt a personal identification. At this time, Ginsberg had been studying the paintings of Cézanne for their use of sudden colour shifts, speculating that this quality would facilitate transformations of perception.

Pressed together in fragments, these poems form a repetitive catalogue of concerns over placement, pertaining to possibilities of spiritual awakening and ideas of the wild.

In A Little Found Found, the references to black and white in these sources are emptied out and refilled with colour names, drawn from the palettes of Pantone, Dulux, Michael Harding, Winsor & Newton, and OpenOffice. This allows A Little Found Found to stage a play of colour and significance, in which colour is conjoined with the conditions of its production.

By using these sources to generate an extended play on colours and their associations, A Little Found Found establishes interrelations between things which may be stolen, referenced, discovered, or reproduced - and consequently, regarded as both ‘lost’ and ‘found.’

Jennie Cole, A Little Found Found (2016)

Details:
Book measures 12.4 x 13.3 x 0.2 cm (approximate due to folding; excluding cover).
Pages are folds in an unconventional accordion-folded loop. 
Edition of 100. 
An artist’s book by Jennie Cole. Made in London, 2016.

Construction:
Outer protective cover of transparent plastic. 
Pages of 120gsm white paper, glued into a folded loop. 
A unique accordion-fold design devised by the artist. 
Title blind-stamped on front cover fold by the artist. 
Text typeset by hand in Gill Sans and printed in black ink by the artist at the London Centre for Book Arts (LCBA): see end of page for images of production process.

A Little Found Found features in private and public collections including the Art books collection at the library of UWE Bristol (UK).

A Little Found Found was exhibited in Printed Poetry, Arnolfini (Bristol, UK, 2021), organised by the Centre for Fine Print Research at UWE Bristol. 

This artist’s book is available for purchase in London at bookartbookshop, or online from Manticoria.