Bag Shell is a self-published artist book written and illustrated by artist Amanda Kyritsopoulou and designed by 'Numbered Editions'.
Spreading across five chapters of prose poetry, collage and illustration, Bag Shell is a series of reflections on the history of the bag as a functional object, a cultural artefact and a metaphor reflecting on urban life, consumerism and the environment, mental health and art.

Bag Shell, 2021
Amanda Kyritsopoulou
Artist Book, edition of 200
94 pages

The first chapter is titled ‘Bag Shell’ introducing the Bag as a functional object with some personal and anecdotal shorts texts on the paradoxes of its use.

Second Chapter ‘Subject Matter’ focuses on the subject, the carrier of the bag, drawing from the etymology-overlap between the word ‘Fool’ and the latin ‘follis’ for the leather bag.

The third chapter ‘Contents’ , which playfully lands right in the middle of the book, focuses on the contents of the bag. There are some bags in history made to contain the tools that bags are made of and that is introduced as way to think about gender. This is the first chapter where there is a use of the first person, or the female third ‘ she’.

The fourth chapter ‘Sculpture Void’ looks at the empty bag, as a way to think about sculpture and art; sculpture and art being gestures of curving something out of nothing, or replacing something lost with something entirely different. An absurd and impossible activity.

Last chapter, the ‘Glossary’ is made of some scans from the Oxford Dictionary, highlighting some key words used in this book.