Bookshop: Art and Bikes - Printing and Re-Thinking The World With Bicycles

Arnolfini Bookshop is delighted to welcome Artists and cyclists Jet McDonald and Nick Hand to introduce their books and discuss the work behind them.

Join us for an evening of Art and cycling when Nick Hand, printmaker, cyclist and author of Conversations from Land’s End to John o’ Groats will be in conversation with Jet McDonald psychiatrist, musician and author of ‘Mind is Ride’ a journey through cycling and philosophy.

Please note that this event will be held in the Bookshop and will be standing room only. If you require a chair, please email bookshop@arnolfini.org.uk so we can organise one for you.

Mind is the Ride – Jet McDonald

When Jet McDonald cycled four thousand miles to India and back, he didn’t want to write a straightforward travel book. He wanted to go on an imaginative journey.

Mind is the Ride takes the reader on a physical and intellectual adventure from West to East using the components of a bike as a metaphor for philosophy, which is woven into the cyclist’s experience. Each chapter is based around a single component, and as Jet travels he adds new parts and new philosophies until the bike is ‘built’; the ride to India is completed; and the relationship between mind, body and bicycle made apparent.

The age of the travelogue is over: today we need to travel inwardly to see the world with fresh eyes. Mind is the Ride is that journey, a pedal-powered antidote to the petrol-driven philosophies of the past.

Conversations from Land’s End to John o’ Groats – Nick Hand

Conversations from Land’s End to John o’Groats is a collection of stories from craftspeople working in places known for making one thing. The publication is part of the Journeyman project. Journeyman is a term used for a trained worker after finishing an apprenticeship who would take to the road with their union card to look for work.

It was these tradespeople that inspired Nick Hand to cycle from Land’s End to John o’Groats on a bicycle with a printing press on the back. Scissors in Sheffield, shoes in Northamptonshire and whisky in Speyside are among the trades visited, and in each studio, workshop or factory, Nick printed postcards celebrating the trade on his printing bike.