Water on the Border, Helen Douglas & Telfer Stokes. Weproductions 1994. Ed 600.

Water on the Border grew partly out of our experience of working with children. It was also initiated by the sparse Border’s landscape in which we lived: sometimes in winter in snow it can look like a Chinese Painting; solitary pines, marks against white. So the idea came to establish connections between Scotland and China: by combining drawings of trees plants and insects made by primary school children with photographic images of water taken from the Yarrow Water, Scotland and West Lake, Hangzhou. HD & TS With the help of the Chinese translator Brian Holton, a friend of ours, Telfer wrote to Xiao Feng the principal of Zhejiang Academy of Fine Art (now the China Academy of Art), and eventually corresponding via a fax machine at our local printers we secured an invitation to go to Hangzhou. Many organisations helped us with this project most notably The Great Britain - China Centre. They put us in touch with the head of education of Zhejiang Province and this opened the door for us to work with children of Yin Ma Jim primary school. All the ink drawings in the book were done by pupils of the school in Hangzhou and two primary schools in Yarrow and Selkirk, Scotland. Similar to Yarrow Cooks we took classes and the children made ink and charcoal drawings often working outside by the waters edge. The photographs of water were by myself (Helen Douglas), a recurring theme in my work. The translation of Chinese poems into Lalands Scots incorporated within the book were by Brian Holton. The experience of looking East, and being in Hangzhou, was formative for this book. Learning Tai Chi embodied chi. Cycling across the Su Causeway on West Lake was filmic in experience: it unrolled as we cycled, vertical trees metered and framed the scene. And Chinese scroll painting together with Chinese books deepened my understanding of the visual reading of narrative across the page. All were to influence the way the book was laid out in rhythm across the page, breaking up the double spread of left and right.

Dr Helen Douglas Text for retrospective exhibition: Weproductions at Printed Matter Inc, NY 2018.

Transcript of an audio recording of Helen Douglas introducing Water on the Border at a hybrid workshop with DAAP at the Women's Art Library, 27 May 2023:

I think you have two of my publications in the [Women’s Art] Library, Mim from ‘85 and then Water on the Border, from ‘94. I mean, I began publishing in ‘74, so there are a lot of books which aren't in the Library including all of my solo productions and other collaborations with women writers. But of the two in the Women’s Art Library, I chose Water on the Border. This book was made in collaboration with my partner at that time, Telfer Stokes — we were ‘Weproductions’. For this book we collaborated and worked with school children in Scotland and in China. The book was conceived as a collaboration between West and East on the theme of water, and the water's edge. Partly the reason why I chose this book to speak about is because of this constant interest in water and borders that comes into my work really from this period onwards. I live in a mill in Scotland, in Yarrow Valley, and there is always this constant flow of water. Water is such an important element for life. And so this book was really exploring the water and the water's edge. I’ll just show you two or three double spreads... as I said we worked with school children in Scotland and in China. These are the Chinese children's drawings of the willow trees. And these work side by side with photographs of water that I took. It was about bringing these things, ink drawings and photographic images together and creating this flow across the page and through the book. Most of my books up to this point, had always been working with more architectural aspects of the book and book form: cover, spine, you know, left, right, back/front of page and whatever. But this was the first book really to explore that flow across the double spread and book. Reaching out from West to East this book was also conceived to work from both ends from back to the front and front to the back. So you can see in the turning of the page, the image wraps around the page. From the late 90s this way of working in a more concertina like form really develops in my work. So borders, water and unravelling across the page become the theme of my book Unravelling the Ripple, published by pocketbooks in 2001. Rebecca Solnit wrote the beautiful essay for this book about borders. It's a theme that comes up constantly in my work. Like for instance, Wild Wood, published in 1999 which, you know, I shouldn't be really be getting out right now but just to show how I worked with borders, on my pages and in the book to explore the ancient woods of the Scottish Borders: I subtitled this book A Border Ballad.