Stickybeak takes its title from an old term for the habitually nosy, and Julie Cockburn treats that impulse as both subject and method. Published by Chose Commune in 2019, the book gathers twelve years of work in which the artist salvages used postcards, old photographs, foxed bookplates and her own childhood drawings, then works over them with hand embroidery, cutting and collage. What arrives as orphaned, anonymous material leaves as something reanimated, its forgotten history overlaid with new mystery.

The book is Cockburn’s first comprehensive monograph, and its timing is deliberate: it appeared alongside her solo exhibition Telling it slant at Flowers Gallery in London, opening September 2019. Rather than a simple survey, the editors assembled a sequence drawn from hundreds of images in the artist’s archive, giving the intricate labour of her collages a lighter touch on the page. Cockburn describes the result as a gentle, humorous narrative, and as a continuation of the transformation her found images undergo.

Design here is not packaging but argument. Bureau Kayser’s contribution and the section-sewn quarterbound hardcover with cloth spine give the work a physical presence suited to objects made by hand. Its 88 pages carry roughly 70 works at 21 by 30 centimetres, accompanied by French and English texts. The title itself frames the whole book: to look closely at strangers is to be a stickybeak, and Cockburn implicates the reader in that curiosity rather than exempting her.

For a collector, the case rests on more than the artist’s standing. This is a coherent body of work with a clear conceptual spine, a defining monograph, and an unusually considered collaboration between artist, designer and publisher. It rewards repeated returns, and invites each viewer to pause on the pieces that speak loudest.