By using the tag Hampton & Co and posing as a backstreet firm with the status of a rag & bone trader, Michael Hampton aims to mock the grandiloquent titling of institutional exhibitions with corporate pretensions.

Invited to put on a solo exhibition at TENSION, the artist subverts and blurs the boundary of a conventional one-person show by moonlighting as an amateur curator, to augment his own book art sculptures, with bespoke contributions from Lee Holden and Christina Mitrentse; along with guest appearences at the closing event from ABC Co-operative and N&B Press.

So what is parabibliography it might well be asked? By questioning the integrity of the codex as artefact and placing it under pressure, manifold treatments and formats emerge beyond the book per se, be it defamiliarised bibliographic curiosities or monstrosities presented as a bizarre archive.

From a 3-D Arte Povera take on Dosteyevsky’s Notes from Underground, to a cut up Robinson Crusoe, from a combustible HB of Zane Grey’s Wildfire (with a wick), to a doll’s house size copy of The Times, and from an assemblage mythologising Duchamp’s sister to a dodo skull reliquary; a store room where books lose coherence and become unreadable.