Lolly Batty
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In this article
Introduction
Welcome to our third Featured Books blog post where I take a deep dive into one book, artist or publisher.
This week we are looking at the artist Lolly Batty and two of her artists' books - Philatelic Items and Crosswords published by The Everyday Press. Both use everyday printed material (crosswords and postage stamps) that pre-exist as elements within familiar rule-based systems that Batty disrupts in these works.
In addition to featuring her books, the article looks at Lolly's earlier work - mathematically derived sculpted objects, handmade yet pristinely precise.
I would like to extend special thanks to the artist and close friend of Lolly, Ian Whittlesea for his generosity in providing background material and archive images for this article.
Philatelic Items
Lolly Batty
Softcover | 21 x 29.7 cm | 68 pp
The Everyday Press | 2022
Edition of 1000
RRP £12
Now £10
Crosswords
Lolly Batty
Softcover | 13 × 2 x 13 cm | 168 pp
The Everyday Press | 2009
Edition of 1000
500 black cover / 500 white cover
RRP £10
Now £7.50
About the Books
Philatelic Items (2022)
This book documents 220 works produced over ten years by Lolly Batty. It includes an index showing the envelopes followed by a selection printed at actual-size.
Batty’s work playfully explores a geometric and systemic logic through the colour and value of the stamps used and their positioning on the envelope. Some envelopes have stamps forming ‘magic squares’ where each row, column and diagonal add up to the same number, some only prime numbers, while others explore the Fibonacci sequence.
The aesthetic appeal of the colour combinations and geometric forms is an outcome of the series, not its main aim. Bearing traces of their passage through the world and the postal system each is also a collaboration with the anonymous hand that franks or cancels the stamps. Some of these collaborators have taken a clear pleasure in adding to the harmony of the composition, others have chosen to aggressively negate it.
I initially saw the stamps as small tiles, differently coloured and with numbers on them. It wasn’t until later that I found out that it was still possible to obtain stamps of all values up to fifty pence, and that some values come in several different colours.... I liked the ‘given’ colours, and that I didn’t need to make a decision.
Lolly Batty
One of the many things that I love about these works is the purity of intentions behind them. They were made without any intention of exhibiting them; they existed for her pleasure and that of the people who received them in the post.
Ian Whittlesea
Artist and friend of Lolly
I love the way Batty reorders this official symbol into unexpected patterns.... It is this combination of formality, wit and quiet subversion that gives Philatelic Items its character.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Rino Pucci
Photographer and writer
Crosswords (2009)
Each of the 168 pages of Crosswords presents a grid of 13 × 13 squares arranged in different black and white configurations, as though they were taken from 168 different crossword puzzles. Separated from any written clues to act as a reference, the gridded designs become optic puzzles in which foreground and background fluctuate.
The book was published with two alternative covers - black and white.
Lolly exhibited the books at Kingston University. With the help of her publisher, Arnaud Desjardin of The Everyday Press, they constructed a table and installed a 13 x 13 grid of the books laid out in the form of one of the crosswords.
Photograph by Ian Whittlesea
Crosswords is a book that might make a crossword addict very cross.
Maria White
Collector
Biography
Lolly Batty (1956-2025)
Lolly was born in London in 1956. She studied at Bath Academy of Art and Camberwell School of Art and exhibited from the 1980s onwards in London (Victoria Miro, Cabinet, Rhodes & Mann, Gallerie Poo Poo) and abroad.
Lolly first became known for her
sculptures - white geometric forms made from polystyrene and plaster. They were painstakingly handmade and yet geometrically perfect. On close inspection one could find occasional indications of her manual labour in the surfaces.
And then she would surprise with other types of object - memorably a perfect white replica of a grand piano which was shown at the short-lived Galerie Poo Poo near Old Street in 1998.
Photograph by Ian Whittlesea
She was very ill for a long time, which eventually stopped her from going to the studio and making the large sculptural work. She responded to these constraints by working with something she could make at home with limited materials but with the same meticulous methodology seen in the sculptures. Lolly didn't use computers, so for Crosswords she photocopied hundreds of blank grids and coloured them in with a pencil.
The mail art project Philatelic Items was made without any intention of exhibiting them; they existed for her pleasure and that of the people who received them in the post. But those around Lolly knew that this body of work (which had grown to over 500 pieces) needed to be seen more widely. The book Philatelic Items was published in 2022, and in 2023 White Columns gallery in New York devoted a solo exhibition to the project. The exhibition featured original postal works presented alongside an extensive selection of facsimiles of the artist’s notes and preparatory drawings.
Photograph by Douglas Atfield
Photograph by Ian Whittlesea
Photograph by Ian Whittlesea
She seems to be more concerned with asking how far it is possible for ideal values to be made present in the world.... Another dynamic is being set up, between the potential world of infinite variation and the subjective assessment of meaningful forms.
Mark Wilsher
Art Monthly, June 2001
Photograph by Ian Whittlesea
The Everyday Press
The Everyday Press is a publisher of art books and artists books working closely with artists, designers and writers paying particular attention to the book as an object.
The main focus is a formal coherence of the idea and purpose of the books and their material make up: this is primarily done by considering available production technologies and the editorial choices made under particular circumstances.
The Everyday Press was started by Arnaud Desjardin in 2007 as a continuation of his activities as an artist, a specialist art bookseller and an academic interested in the history of artists books.
Reviews & Press for Lolly Batty
The book feels distinctly British to me. Its material is inseparable from the familiar image of the late Queen reproduced across the stamps – I loved the way Batty reorders this official symbol into unexpected patterns: by colour, into frames, grids and other clever arrangements. It is this combination of formality, wit and quiet subversion that gives Philatelic Items its character.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Rino Pucci
Photographer and writer
The grid takes on an aesthetic form with the black becoming more dominant and meaningful, giving shape, reversing the attention normally given to the white squares. Crosswords is a book that might make a crossword addict very cross.
Maria White
Collector
There is certainly something generous and egalitarian about Batty’s process: the melding of the random with the unlimited intervention of a large system: a system both particular and universal. The formal qualities of the results, that are subverted and humanised by the accidental of mechanical and human intervention. In this sense this work is both singularly authored, and a ‘collaboration’ with the postal system and its workers. A cooperation, a joint endeavour between artist and unseen workers. By posting these various grid patterns she puts them in motion, creating a chain of events which invite and welcome the journey and enjoys its intention, and result.
Christabel Stewart
Curator, lecturer and editor
Exploring the languages and methodologies of minimalism, conceptualism, mail art, and much more besides, Batty’s Philatelic Items are determinedly “social” works of art... a “joint endeavour” between Batty and her unseen and unknown collaborators.
White Columns
Exhibition press release
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