THE BOOK OF HOURS AND BREATHS

A 24-hour event. A 1,000ml breath. A book measured in both.

What does print mean now – for a body that spends most of its time inside systems designed to make sensing invisible?

There are things you can only sense – the weight of an object that has absorbed twenty-four hours of work. The grain of paper recording the drift of a wrist when the body is spent, and knows it. The difference between a mark made afresh and one made when the focus drifted. These minor gestures are the argument.

The Book of Hours and Breaths is a handmade artist book, one year and half-a-lifetime in the making. Its dimensions were calibrated until the physical volume of the object – 15 × 15 × 4.5 cm – matched the capacity of a deliberate human inhalation: 1,000 ml. When you lift it, you sense this. When you sense it, you grasp it.

The project is currently in development as practice-based research for an MRes in Philosophy and Art Theory at Central Saint Martins, UAL, graduating 2026. Degree show scheduled for 30 June – 5 July, CSM, Granary Building, London

The Print Vigil: twenty-four uninterrupted hours at the studio, working relief and silkscreen presses through one full turning of the earth. One body, one studio, eight matrices, a limited palette of black, blue, red, and white. The medieval Book of Hours enters as structure: eight canonical hours – Vigil, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, Compline – borrowed for their rhythm, pressed against the studio hours to find what holds.

Each hour generates its own mark. Early pulls: precise, calibrated, the body governing the press. By the middle hours the rhythm shifts – the press governs the body. By the final hours the boundary dissolves. The drift in the registration is not error. It is the record of what holding costs.

The codex that emerged measures 15 × 15 × 4.5 cm – the volume of a deliberate deep breath. The lung became the measure of the architecture.

15 × 15 × 4.5 cm

1,000 ml volume

Relief + silkscreen

Hand-pulled, hand-bound in Voronoi 3D-printed case

Unique / limited

The codex is housed in a 3D-printed Voronoi case – each cell shaped by proximity to its neighbours, the geometry of individuation through relation. The case has two states: cover for the book at rest, lantern for the room when the book is absent. Body enclosing body. The object carries what the Print Vigil settled into it: twenty-four hours of pressure, layer over layer, the body’s changing capacity written into the grain.

Enquire about the edition

We live, most of us, inside systems designed to make sensing invisible. What this project recovers – through twenty-four uninterrupted hours at the press, through the resistance of ink and paper and fatigue – is the body’s capacity to know it is being acted upon.

THE ARCHIVE OF THE EVENT COMING SOON…

In September 2026, The Book of Hours and Breaths moves from the singular studio into a living teaching space. At the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica, Venice – during the 61st International Art Exhibition, In Minor Keys – the press will continue its labour in dialogue with other bodies learning what devotion to ink and paper actually costs, and what it can generate. The codex travels. The vigil repeats, differently, in other hands.

For collectors

Unique hand-pressed codex with Voronoi case. Enquire about availability, edition, and conditions of acquisition.

For institutions

The full project includes written paper, artist book, Animations, Lexicon, and studio archive. Available for exhibition, residency, and teaching contexts.

a look inside the dramaturgy of the print studio