In the summer of 1998 I visited the Beguinage of Sint Elisabeth a space, a place of contemplation, built originally for a community of pious and celibate women and founded in Flanders in the 13th century. Beguinages or Begynhof, are within walled spaces within a city, where the gate is locked each evening and then unlocked each morning. I had a key to let me in - the only sound that broke the silence was the swallows, flying freely within and without. Inside the exhibition space I found a trapped swallow flying silently and endlessly round and round. I opened the windows, and set the swallow free.

In the centre of the beguinage is a lawn with a huge tree giving shade in the heat of the day. I took a leaf from the tree - an Acer Saccarinum witte esdoom (a sugar maple with thorns) and pressed it in one of my books as a memento. On my return home I decided to use this leaf as the template for the ‘catalogue’ of the exhibition ‘WITHOUT’ which was held in the Sint Annazal Gallery in the Beguinage of Sint Elisabeth in 1999. I used a drawn outline of the leaf that was then laser cut out – leaving an absence, literally ‘taking the leaves out of my book.

WITHOUT Inside the upper gallery I installed a mechanical swallow that flew endlessly round and round in the space and opened all the windows. The noise from the live swallows outside was now absent as they had already migrated for the winter. In the lower gallery space I installed two tables. One had the centre cut out. I suspended all the leaves from each of the WITHOUT books from the ceiling over the void. This piece was entitled ‘catch me if I fall’ (fall being the reference to leaves in autumn). The cut out section was reattached with hinges to make a ‘dropped leaf’ table. The other table was made from the cut out and had the publication/catalogue WITHOUT held down with a clamp.

The remaining 99 publication/catalogues WITHOUT, intended as a souvenir or memento mori, were placed on shelves in a cupboard in the gallery space for visitors to take away. On the inside of the cupboard door was a slide projection of the outside of the beguinage.

Sint Annazal Gallery, Beguinage of Sint Elisabeth, Kortrijk, Belgium.

A black hardback book, cloth bound, rectangular (landscape orientation) approx 26 x 21.5 cm. The book is covered with a fairly fine weave canvas (or coarse weave cotton) with the title "Without" impressed into the cover, and into the spine, along with the artist's name. Inside, the book is held together with shiny brass screws, the pages are white and plain except for the identical maple leaf design cut out of the centre of each one, leaving a deep hole through the book. They are also perforated along the inside edge. The material is quite textured but feels quite soft to touch, the screws are cold and hard and the pages are smooth (apart from the edges of the cut-outs which are sharp). Open the book, turn pages carefully (though they are all the same, or tear off a sheet at a time along the perforations.) The sharp edges of the cut outs, which would be ruined by too much handling. The contrast between the white pages and the black of the covers and leaf cut-out.

These material descriptions of the Artists’ Book Collection were written during a volunteer placement at the Women’s Art Library in 2009 when Charlotte was a student at LCC on the Book Arts programme (which no longer exists).

The WITHOUT book/catalogue was included in an exhibition and publication entitled: 'Of Green Leaf Bird and Flower’, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven. Published by Yale University Press, Newhaven and London (2014)