Sleeping State of Being.

(Creatures of Night and Day).

Sara Skorgan Teigen.

Journal, Sweden, 2022. English, 64 pp., 135 color and b/w images, 8x11½".

Selected as one of the Best Books of 2023 by:

Julia Borissova

The sketchbook has always been used as a tool to study and understand nature by drawing. My sketchbooks with photographs, drawings and collages become the physical gathering point where impressions and observations of the outside world and my inner world meet. The psychological truth takes physical form and is manifested in the pages of the sketchbook; studying and drawing structures taken from nature gives me time to reflect on how forms and rules coexist. I use myself as subject and object, playing, wondering and questioning my own role in life, and moving between the personal and the archetypal. I map my inner landscapes through the design of the sketchbook's pages.

A key in the project is how the sketchbook as a medium never insists on a conclusion or a final answer, but is an investigative medium in itself. This goes hand-in-hand with my fascination with the things we cannot see, such as the micro/macro-cosmos, psychological and emotional experiences and existential questions, which also do not have or can ever have any definitive answers.

The sketchbook form allows me to examine these really big questions that take up so much space in me, but which, with words alone, so quickly fall into cliché. —Sara Skorgan Teigen

"Some books are photobooks. Some books are artist books. The difference can sometimes be subtle, but Teigan is definitely working in the ‘artist book’ category. Not only is Sleeping State of Being a remarkable work of art, it is also a remarkable facsimile of an artist book. Sara Skorgan Teigan’s previous publication, Fractal State of Being, is one of my most treasured possessions. I mean that; it’s not just one of my most treasured books, but possessions. It has inspired me routinely for the last 6 years. Now we have Sleeping State of Being, which expands upon the former book; while the former book explored the fragility of the human form against the often mineral landscapes of nature, the new work explores the rich and strange inner world of the artist’s mind (Inner State of Being was an earlier, discarded title): emotions, dreams, the feelings that fall apart at being spoken. And, while words abound (very very minuscule written words), it is the marks and photographs (cut small and inserted) that make this book a treasure.

"As with the previous publication Journal has done such a good job printing this, that I haven’t a clue how they’ve done it. If you crave very fine artist books (that are also gracefully affordable), if you adore facsimile, if you think the mind is a mysterious place to live and sleep and desire from, then this book is for you. Grab one right away. Fractal State of Being was in print for such a short amount of time that some people don’t believe it exists, but it does – just as Sleeping State of Being does exist, but if you hesitate too long, by the time you wake to getting one, it could be gone."

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