We are small is a book of tipp-ex poetry (in The Netherlands tipp-ex is the word for the correction fluid that in some other countries is called whiteout). It reflects on a letter that Tonnard received while staying at a B&B in Oxford. On each page of the book the complete text of this letter is printed, but parts of it are made white. In this manner new poems are revealed that were already present in the original text. The poems are bleak, the view of the world hostile. Emptiness seems to pervade the world – “o old / things” – that this book talks about. On a literal level the emptiness is visible everywhere in the use of white space.

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Available from: http://elisabethtonnard.com/works/we-are-small/

Elisabeth Tonnard is a Dutch artist and poet working in artists’ books, photography and literature. Since 2003 she has published thirty books in which texts and images extracted from the cultural archive are processed and laid out to exhibit their latent messages. The works range in scale and method from a book that is completely invisible, to a book containing a short story that swallowed a novel, to a book that is a swimming pool. The books are included in numerous public collections and are exhibited widely.