British poet and artist David Robilliard was one of the first artists to colonise London’s Shoreditch in the late 1970s, where he established his practice and worked as an assistant for Gilbert & George. Since his premature death from an AIDS-related illness in 1988, his work has been embraced by critics and collectors and recognised through retrospective exhibitions in London and Amsterdam. This book, published by Rob Tufnell with support from A Practice for Everyday Life, presents collected facsimile reproductions from Robilliard’s numerous notebooks.
These notebook pages encompass drafts of his poems, irregular diary entries, contacts, ideas, reflections, a handful of drawings and plenty of irreverent content. We worked with Tufnell to select pages and images for facsimile reproduction, printing these modestly in greyscale on a tactile white uncoated paper. The book is Otabound, to allow it to lay flat and show as much of the spreads as possible. Its cover is foiled with a reproduction of handwritten notes taken from one of Robilliard’s notebooks.
