You Know I Am Not There, published by Eriskay Connection in 2020, takes its title from a line in “Know,” a song by the English singer-songwriter Nick Drake, who died in 1974 at twenty-six. The book gathers the research and drawings of the visual artist Danielle Lemaire, who followed Drake’s traces, entered his mystical view of the world, and corresponded with admirers and fans. Letters, photographs, moving images, online conversations, and documents from Lemaire’s personal archive appear alongside that new body of drawings. Five authors contribute texts—Leonor Faber-Jonker, Lieneke Hulshof, Dingeman Kuilman, and Adam Scovell among them—with editing by Marie Baarspul and Masha van Vliet, in English and Dutch. Peter Cox’s photography records the work.
The subject is not Drake’s biography so much as the conditions of his reception. Around a small body of recorded songs and scarce image and sound material, fans have built an image of the man and a nostalgic longing for a lost world. Lemaire treats that space between presence and absence, truth and fantasy, myth and reality as her material, and she questions what the pursuit of authenticity costs vulnerable artists. The book accompanies an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Breda. Its pages hold letters, photographs, and conversations with “Drakeheads” as evidence of how a cult following is made, and they let the drawings answer those documents rather than illustrate them.
The book is 24 by 32 centimetres, 120 pages, and issued as a Swiss-bound softcover with uncut signatures, a construction that asks the reader to open the pages by hand and slows the encounter. Because the drawings and archive are gathered here as one project, rather than as a document of songs already known, the volume has value for readers interested in how visual artists work through another artist’s afterlife. It is a first edition of 500 copies, supported by the Stedelijk Museum Breda.
