Since 2014 Mick Finch has worked on the Book of Knowledge’ series of digital prints and videos where he appropriates images from, a 1950s set of encyclopedias of the same name. Finch remembers well, as a child, and before the arrival of television ,his fascination with its images. However, this is not a memory project. The impetus was more to assemble a closed and clearly defined archive that can be explored. Finch scanned all of the 3000 images from the volumes at the very high resolution of 1200 dpi. This was because as the origination of the images are in analogue photography and because of the various means used to print the images, this high resolution renders the possibility of not only working at a larger scale than which the original images were printed, it also gives the means to explore and exploit the reprographic qualities of the material. Images are digitally collaged together. Power relationships and positivist, colonial ideology underpins the pictorial rhetoric of the material that are combined in these collages. World War II is alive in the ruins of living memory and haunts the material. Question about ideology that Finch has encountered in his readings and writing, such as with Louis Althusser’s ‘The Institutional State Apparatus’ or Raymond Williams’ ‘Structures of Feeling, come to the fore in this series. The series numbers, to date, over 150 works that use a series of compositional gambits with which the material is explored.

All the works are archival digital prints on Hahnemühle German Etching paper. The details of each print’s edition are given in the works list at the end of this document. The series began in 2014 and is on-going.
The full online archive of the Book of Knowledge series can be accessed at:

www.mickfinch.com/BOK/index.html and www.mickfinch.com/BOK/index99+.html

Since 2022 Finch has shifted to video montage and has made an ongoing series of videos from the Book of Knowledge archive that currently numbers some 20 short works.

Mick Finch’s practice takes the form of studio work and writing. He exhibits his work regularly and internationally most recently at the Sid Motion Gallery (London 2017), Engrams, a one-person show at the Piper Gallery (London 2013). He has lead the Tableau research project at CSM an outcome of which was the conference Tableau: Painting Photo Object at Tate Modern in 2011. He lived and worked in France for 20 years and is a member of the French research group Peinture: un réseau de recherche, funded by the French Ministry of Culture. In 2011 he was an Abbey Fellow in Painting at the British School in Rome and he is a Senior Scholar of the Terra Foundation in Paris. He is a member of the artistic committee of the Institut Français’ Fluxus Group. He is also a member of the Faculty of Fine Art of the British School at Rome. At the University of the Arts, Central Saint Martins, London he is Professor of Visual Art Practice.

Further information can be accessed at www.mickfinch.com