the book project

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You can now read excerpts from Tudor Antoniu Bucea’s book of poems and purchase copies at $25 each with free shipping, here

  • New signage of Ten Taylor Street by Lesley Dimmick

The aim of this project is to produce the book Running TAP [1990-2015] which is a wide-ranging archive of an independent artist run organisation devoted to art and artists in Sydney, Australia, known as TAP Art Gallery.  It is an archive of audio-visual recordings, visual documentation that includes; photographs, graphic design, newsletters, catalogues, news publications and published media.  The total archive also contains the printed material that has accompanied every activity and operation, as well aa a considerable body of the ephemera, printed and written records of the book project production, sketches, proposals, meetings that have been minuted and project initiatives.

The book Running TAP began as a simple idea: a written account of recorded interviews with artists and friends of TAP Gallery that were to have been accompanied by portraits painted by Lesley Dimmick OAM, Founder and Manager of TAP Gallery.

The book Running TAP book project came into its own as a vital artwork in progress and the contemporary creative construction began in earnest in 2018. The creative construction has become a conscious collaborative action, sculptural in concept, of accumulation and stacking, as well as the writing, transcribing of interviews, compiling of visual elements and editing of a given reality.  It is part reportage and part memoir spanning 30 years of the independent arts across a generation of artists in the 1990s.

“It just became so popular. I was just amazed that the weeks rolled into years and now it’s 30 years. The thing is that we were only there through demand. If people didn’t book us we wouldn’t be here.”

Lesley Dimmick interviewed by Angela Stretch

Lesley Dimmick, the founder provides her account of the life-and-times as the Manager of a non-curatorial artist run community organisation. Dimmick’s portrayal is assisted by a milieu of voices that supports the book as social sculpture over times, the location of Darlinghurst and the character of TAP Gallery.  The cast of characters are people who Dimmick deals with everyday, they include: artists, painters, musicians, poets, actors, photographers, performers, singers, playwrights, composers, songwriters, digital artists, sound artists, video and film-makers, inventors, comedians, magicians, and the many varieties of observers, administrators, collectors, curators, directors and producers.

We may say that Running TAP the book project reflects the radical re-definitions, or re-negotiations, of the accepted terms of art in widening the possibilities for art and activities related to art to provide evidence that art is an evolutionary and revolutionary power.

We have the actual presentation of a freighted discourse within the ambit of the Australian visual arts in the book Running TAP.  It is accumulative, open-ended and holds the maximal contact with the present.  It is a major achievement.

Here comes everybody!

We are proud to be supported by the City of Sydney

You too can sponsor us, go to our sponsors page to find out how.