END x 1250 is a gift; an invitation to ‘please take one’. Gabrielle Guy received a phone call from the printers letting her know that there was space on the sheet of a catalogue commission she was willing toward completion as the year approached its close. With the printing technique, paper, inks, page size and print run already determined by the project underway, she had ten minutes to think of something to salvage the space, or see it go to waste. The result is a slender, slippery stack of 1250 ‘ends’ (or thereabouts, accommodating the printer’s tendency to extras) for giving away. Gabrielle makes books. As a ‘bookish’ artist, she is interested in pictures of pictures; the reproduction of artworks into the catalogues that she is most often assembling. Images in books are ordered. In being bound, the book is resolved. Where the book presents conviction, these are loose ends, multiples, an end for whoever wants (or needs) it. 

Proto, the store at A4 Arts Foundation, is intended as a space for practitioners to imagine into, where they can sell edge objects that may as yet be propositional, from fragments to off-cuts. Because Gabrielle wanted to gift the work freely to the public, we decided to place it at the entrance to A4’s free-to-public library instead of inside the museum shop. As a takeaway, END x 1250 plays with the proposition of the museum store. The ‘gift shop’ comes to mind.