Microreview: Piecing Pages – On working in fragments

1 Piecing Pages On working in fragments Line Arngaard ed copy
Piecing Pages – On working in fragments (2025). Edited, designed and self-published by Line Arngaard. ISBN 9789493246997 (248 pages, 20 x 26 cm).
2 Piecing Pages from Lucy Lippards article Up Down and Across copy
Piecing Pages, pages from Lucy R. Lippard: “Up, Down and Across: A new frame for new quilts”
3 Piecing Pages from Joke Robaards contribution Forecast Aftergrass
Piecing Pages, pages from Joke Robaard: “Forecast, Aftergrass”
4 Piecing Pages Kate Briggs piecing pages
Kate Briggs piecing pages desktop snapshot
5 A patch work screen for barker jane 1723
Title page of A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies. Jane Barker (source: Internet Archive)
Date
2026 February
Subtitle
Kate Briggs reviews Line Arngaard: Piecing Pages: On working in fragments, self-published by the author, 2025.
Type
microreview
Author / Publisher
Kate Briggs for NewsLibrary
Guest Editor

Nienke Terpsma

Reviewer

Kate Briggs is a writer and translator based in Rotterdam, where she co-runs the micropress Short Pieces That Move! She is the author of This Little Art (2017), Entertaining Ideas (2018) and The Long Form (2023) and recently translated two novellas by Hélène Bessette: Lily is Crying (2025) and Twenty Minutes of Silence (forthcoming June 2026).

@shortpiecesthatmove

Publication Language

English

Also published here

Newsletter No. 75

@sarn_switzerland

Reviewed Publication

Piecing Pages – On working in fragments (2025). Edited, designed and self-published by Line Arngaard. ISBN 9789493246997 (248 pages, 20 x 26 cm).

In 1723, Jane Barker published a novel titled A Patchwork Screen for the Ladies. It opens with a direct address, a welcome and a defense of her method of composition. Why (Barker imagines a doubtful reader asking) a book ‘composed of Patches?’ Because: it’s a novel about women, whose ‘Sentiments’ (like their politics and their experiences) are ‘as mix’d as the patches in their work’. Because nevertheless they sit together – in what Barker calls ‘harmonious … Disunion’. She adds: putting ‘me in mind of what I have heard some Philosophers assert, about the Clashing of Atoms, which at last united to compose this glorious Fabrick of the Universe!’ 303 years later, Line Arngaard has pieced together a similarly glorious and various collection, transferring her interests in methods of written composition to visual practices of ‘working in fragments’. The resulting book is historically, socially and materially differentiated. It is colourful and convivial and generative: a project built from friendship, contingency, the risks of asking (emails to Melissa Meyer, a letter posted to Lucy Lippard, could I republish…?) and the joys of receiving answers (Yes! Yes!). Composed in ‘small pockets of time’, its scales are interpersonal, international and cosmic.