I've worked within this form, I've exploited it, I've worked within this constraint, and now it's sort of time to blow it up.

Hello and welcome to episode 28 of Art Juice.

This is honest, generous and humorous conversations

that will feed your creative soul

and get you thinking with me Alice Sheridan and Louise Fletcher is taking a break while I take time to talk with today's guest.

She worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for 25 years and her final project there was writing the wall labels for the new

British galleries and this led to a rather unique book that we're going to talk about.

It tickled my fancy, piqued my interest. I read it on holiday and I'm really looking forward to the discussion. But I think our conversation today is going to meander into what it takes what the requirements are in the higher end of the art world, how we choose words to describe ourselves and also probably touch on ideas of ownership, women, art.

Congratulations on your book which I think is actually published today and

welcome Christine Coulson to Art Juice.

Thank you, thank you for having me. So tell us a little bit, what is the format of the book? Because I think that's the thing that everybody immediately sits up and goes,

oh, juicy, tell me more.

So first of all, what's the format?

Yeah, I think that the format was very important to me too.

So the book is written almost entirely in museum wall labels and you know those little descriptions that sit next to every work of art in a gallery and that everyone kind of just blindly reads and that habit they have of just kind of consuming them.

So I've taken this very banal form and used it for my own narrative purposes. I've kept all those things what we call in the museum world the tombstone information which is the artist and the date and the medium and all that.

Every page has that tombstone and then really following the rules of the

Metropolitan Museums label label editors, every description is then 75 words or less.

So that's the constraint, that's the word limit.

Every page spread in the book on the right you find the label just as you

would in a gallery. On the left though the page is left blank and that's where I imagine you as the reader sort of conjuring the work of art.

And so I love this idea of this complicity in the process that you as the reader have to kind of create in your mind what I'm describing.

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