Art Book Market Provides Unique Opportunities For Creative Talent

Art books have always represented a niche, though they’ve spiked in popularity ever since they met their perfect match: the coffee table.

Often used as objet d’art, and priced accordingly, these increasingly big and beautiful tomes are beloved by celebrities, influencers and interior designers. Welcome to the small but mighty area of publishing that’s seeing strong growth and is projected to be worth just under $200 million by 2028.

But it’s not just the market that makes coffee table books interesting. With their lush photography and illustrations, liberated from the tyranny of the pixel, they’re a rare chance for creatives to display their ideas in a tactile form. Georgia Metaxas is one such artist who relished the opportunity to reveal her work in a physical way.

An educator and multi-award-winning fine art photographer, Metaxas’ work is characterized by her documentary approach to tradition and heritage and her emotionally powerful portraiture, which has been acquired for private collections across the world, as well public institutions such as the National Gallery of Victoria and City of Melbourne Arts & Heritage Collection, among others.

Metaxas has Greek roots, was born and raised in Australia, and now lives in London. A lifetime of shifting identities and homes have made her something of an expert on what place can mean to people. Mnemosyne Grove, Metaxas’ first book, charts part of her odyssey via rich visual storytelling that explores the nature of memory, which she calls “porous and complex.”

Over the course of several years, Metaxas journeyed across Greece, diving into a personal history. One photoshoot shows portraits of olive trees, luminous and corrugated, set against a glossy ink black night. They loom out of the photographs, beguilingly ancient—some are over 500 years old. They stand in an olive grove bequeathed to her mother’s family in Palairos. Each tree was named after a woman in Metaxas’ family, giving them even greater personality. “As humans we’re always anthropomorphizing things,” she says, “though I love the fact that they’re named after women in my family.”

Interlaced between the “ladies”, as Metaxas calls the olive trees, are super-8 film stills taken by her father during a family trip to Greece. “My dad’s side of the family migrated in 1901 to Australia, but they were from Ithaca,” she shares. These images show a grainy violet sea, bright vistas, chipped marble relics and blurred figures. Tragically, Metaxas’ father passed away during this trip, transforming these holiday snapshots into a haunting final memento. As Metaxas says, “Umpteen years later, I am now recontextualizing those images.”

Although intensely personal, the book deals with themes everyone can recognize: connection to land, migration, and family ties. “I think photography has a slippery relationship to memory,” she explains. “Often the image is what remains, we forget the actual moment. It’s like that birthday party you went to as a child – there’s a photograph you remember, but nothing else.”

Her publisher, Melbourne-based Perimeter Editions, gave her significant freedom. “I had as much time as I needed. Usually, I’d be quite strict and process-based, but with this I just let it unravel.” This method allowed her to make unexpected connections on site: “things surfaced that I probably wouldn’t have come across if I’d been more strategic. I just reveled in the making and finding of things I was attracted to.”

Allowed to meander through the project, the airy feeling of being able to breath comes across in the pages. “Once you’ve hung out with a tree that’s 500 years old, you think about time in a different way. I call it Arboreal Time. You realize how insignificant you are.”

Despite the dramatic monochrome images, it’s this thoughtful humility which defines the book. Metaxas says she’d like to encourage people to relate to a physical book like this one rather than the busy digital world; perhaps that’s why Mnemosyne Grove is relatively small for a coffee table book, giving it a meditative quality. She calls it “quite quiet, quite intimate”; a description that mirrors the experience of looking through the pages.

This also makes the book much more readable (or should that be “lookable”?) compared to its heftier cousins on the market. Metaxas achieves something special here – a bridge between solely decorative mammoth art books and the standard hardbacks you’re more likely to read. Could it be a new format be in the making? “An artist’s book is still an object,” she says, “I see it as malleable, and I intend to keep playing with it.”

For more information on Mnemosyne Grove, please visit Perimeter Editions

To stay up to date with Georgia Metaxas, or to see more of her work, follow her here.