At this year’s Dundee Design Festival, bookends got their moment in the spotlight. Often the humble sidekick to your favorite reads, they stepped out from the shadows to become centerpieces of an exhibition that’s all about storytelling, adventure, and design.
The Bookends exhibition marked a double anniversary: Dundee’s tenth year as a UNESCO City of Design and Edinburgh’s twentieth as a UNESCO City of Literature. The exhibit draws inspiration from two trailblazing female journalists, Bessie Maxwell and Marie Imandt, who made headlines over a century ago with their globetrotting reporting. They opened eyes to the cultures, landscapes, and lives of women around the world, all from the vantage point of the 1890s.
Lauren Morsley – Wonder: “This project afforded me the opportunity to delve into an unfamiliar process, and it’s been such a fun and informative experience”
For the exhibition, 20 designers from across Scotland were tasked with reinterpreting the women’s extraordinary travels through the lens of – you guessed it – bookends. “Every bookend has a story and we wanted to invite some of Scotland’s most interesting and inventive designers to tell their own,” shares Dundee Design Festival Creative Director Stacey Hunter. Each designer took cues from the textures, colors, and cultural insights Bessie and Marie detailed in their writings. The resulting exhibition is a beautiful mashup of art, history, and design, where bookends do more than just hold books – they hold stories. It’s a tribute to two remarkable women who changed how the world saw women in journalism.
James Rigler – Foreign Objects: “‘Foreign Objects’ are… intimate in scale, but transform the bookshelf itself into a vibrant, other-worldly landscape.”
The full list of designers and studios featured are: Adam Johnston, Akiko Matsuda, Alistair Byars of GRAS, Aymeric Renoud, Camillo Atlas, Steven Blench of Chalk Plaster, Ciara Isabel Neufeldt, Granite + Smoke (Lindsey Hesketh + Claire Canning), James Rigler, Jennifer Gray, Juli Bolaños-Durman, Kate Trouw, Lauren Morsley, Louise Forbes Design, Marc Sweeney, MULGREW, Nicholas Denney Studio, Nick Ross, Wobbly Digital by Soorin Shin, Stefanie Ying Lin Cheong. Here are a few that we particularly loved:
Steven Blench – HB Graphite: “The pencil is a tool which many writers choose to make their mark – sketching out and refining drafts before committing their ideas to print. Graphite is the material in which so many stories begin to find their form – long before they are ‘fixed’ on the printed page. It seemed like the perfect material for bookends.”
Nicolas Denney – Past hopes for the future: “A round the world voyage seemed like the ideal subject matter to investigate the concept of landscape as a transition of materials, formed by processes of compression and erosion.”
Juli Bolanos Durman – Possibilities of Enjoyment: “My bookends are a celebration of women, our sensibility and this incredible soft power; a sixth sense. A silhouette of the feminine form and a breast, our universal symbol. The bookends are an ode to this force and our call to fight for everyone’s equality.”
Granite + Smoke (Lindsey Hesketh + Claire Canning) – Ten Shores: The bookends honour the adventurous spirit and pioneering bravery of Marie Imandt and Bessie Maxwell, encapsulating 19th-century cultural insights and Dundee’s UNESCO recognition.”
Akiko Matsuda – Beyond: “These paired ring-shaped bookends symbolize the two women’s growth as they traveled across the globe.”
Aymeric Renoud – Stack: “It was important for us to put an accent on materiality, first because it is one of the main ethos of our studio but also because we think it is such a significant source of inspiration within the field we evolve in as well as Marie and Bessie keen eyes for details.”
Jennifer Gray – World at her fingertips: “Spheres represent the globe to reflect, travel and global connectedness of the current-day Journalists with the world at her fingertips.”
Kate Trouw – Union: “The Union bookends are made from repurposed waste materials and materials that have been responsibly sourced through sustainable harvesting methods. The intention behind this re-purposing of non-precious, commonplace materials is to use design to elevate their perceived value through the processes of collage and abstraction.”
Louise Forbes Design – For Books not Buildings: “I tried lots of different compositions before I landed on the final placement of everything. I’ve always, unintentionally, made things that look like wee characters, and these wee guys are no different!”
Adam Johnston – A Material Library of Scotland: “For a designer, a materials library is just as important as a reference library. These bookends combine the two to create a unique pair of objects that blur the line between books and samples.”
Camillo Atlas – interdependence: “… it was clear from the start that I wanted the bookends to be abstracted and minimal, linked to the book through its inspiration whilst also able to be used and looked at without any context.”
Learn more about the Bookends exhibition at dundeedesignfestival.com.
Photography by Reuben Paris.
