Dolly: Edition Unlimited
A pop-out jig-sawed book-work on the theme of the cloned sheep, Dolly, with a freestanding herd of sheep integrated into the form of the book. Text on covers taken from newspaper headlines and Nature magazine, printed letterpress. 17 signed copies, 20 x 23 x 5cm. Circle Press, London, 1997
“Dolly: Edition Unlimited by Karen Bleitz represents in book form the debate over cloning that was exacerbated by Dolly the sheep. The artist found herself in the curious situation of reading an article about Dolly the sheep and the breakthrough in the cloning process in Nature magazine before the article had made it through to the soundbites of mass media news. The book is composed of text from the original article with views from the public spliced between. The whole feast of human expression is here: the fears and wishes for a future salvaged or corrupted by advancements in science. The textual technique used in splicing the texts is called a Chimera: a monster created with parts from multiple animals. The technique fuses a new creature from disparate texts. This work has a double-centre, in addition to the chimerical text the centre of the book has a pull-out Dolly sheep, stripped of all identity, void of features. It is a fitting twist to the story that only 17 of the 20 Dollies made it through the complicated binding process under the extraction of a hacksaw working within a 1mm fault-line. Replication of identical forms is implicit with danger.”
Chris McCabe from arc: UNBOUND . London: Arc Editions, 2013
Dolly: Edition Unlimited featured in the Animal Tales exhibition at the British Library.
This work is dedicated to the ‘sublimely oblivious’ sheep 6LL3 (a.k.a. Dolly) who was first introduced to the world by I. Wilmut, A.E. Schnieke, J. McWhir, A.J. Kind, and K.H.S. Campbell in the article Viable Offspring Derived From Fetal and Adult Mammalian Cells which was featured in the February 1997 issue of Nature magazine.
Weston, Heather. “Structure as Metaphor – Dolly: Edition Unlimited by Karen Bleitz.” Bookcraft. London: Quarto Publishing, 2008
Selected Exhibitions
British Library – Animal Tales and Art of the Book, London, UK
Saison Poetry Library – Visual Poetics, London, UK
Klingspor Museum – Arc Unbound, Offenbach, Germany
Arizona Museum for Youth – Outside the Book, Mesa, AZ
Yale Center for British Art – Cooking the Books, New Haven, CT
Collections
The British Library, London
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT
Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA
Columbia University, New York, NY
Jack Ginsberg Collection of Book Arts, South Africa
Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA
Lafayette College, Easten, PA
Temple University, Philadelphia, PA
University of the Arts London, London
Mills College, Oakland, cA
Private collections