From hand scroll to iPad app: Transforming Helen Douglas’ The Pond at Deuchar

This article takes as its point of focus the work of book artist Helen Douglas. Douglas’ The Pond at Deuchar of 2011 is a hand scroll, measuring 14 metres long and printed on Chinese paper in small edition. Rendered digitally as a prototype iPad app, the 2012 version of The Pond at Deuchar has the potential to become widely available to new readers. At the same time, it radically alters our experience of the work as screen replaces paper and new gestures replace the act of rolling and unrolling. In its digital rendering there is, perhaps, nothing but surface, except that zoom technology enables a more immersive engagement of sorts. It is a focus upon surface, however, that underscores the tension between virtual and visceral, analogue and digital, page and screen. That surface becomes the site of our imagining and, in Jacques Rancière’s terms, ‘the place of a taking-place’. At once reassessing and reaffirming the paper scroll, Douglas’ iPad app offers restitution to the idea of the book, or scroll, providing new modes of engagement and a new surface to explore. Here each form of the work supports the other, while informing our understanding of both.