Finishing The Project: Artist’s Books

The Gnosis Set
How It Comes To Experience You
It Borrows You For A while

The space (and time) that β€˜It’ (iron as life) inhabits, is suggested by the wide horizon effected by the opened-out concertina form of the books, each concluding with an enclosure in which shared experience can enter shared space – respectively, the space respiration and chemical circulation systems occupy in the commonality of living things.

Taking Shape

Last weekend, I made a mock-up for the book format I am going to use for the final ‘Scrap That’ artefact. I am basing my design on the gorgeous Watanabe book I discovered in my earlier research. In her case, she had used a folding box structure to represent rooms in a traditional Japanese house in which, the fusama open out as ‘pages’ bearing translations into modern Japanese of writings her father had made. I love the way the format facilitates the creation of sequences of pages (like a journey) and enclosed space (like a resting place). My intention is to build my book so that the ‘reading order’ is a journey along which I read my poem before meeting my loved ones and sharing thoughts with them before entering the final resting place by way of a walk through my home landscape and into the enclosed space of the book … the sort of flower strewn chamber of the Iam Dulcis. It is a very complicated structure.

The book leaves represented in the picture above – in green card – will support the printed images of my poem done in the Photoshop workshop. They will run through the first reading order section, sort of the zig-zag inwards, and lead to fabric covered openings in which the cream card features will be enclosed. These will be fabric covered (significant remnants) and close with the ceramic buttons I made. Within each of these fabric ‘chapters’ of the book will be pictures (from print workshop) words and mementos (collected/made ephemera as the assignment brief says) for my loved ones. The reading journey on the reverse side of the zig- zag section will be fabric covered with pieces developed since the textile workshop. All will be stitched in place with pieces of my wedding veil running along the pages to create a liminal obscurity. This will turn into the opened out enclosed space at the end of reading, to represent a shroud. The walls of the enclosed space will bear the Photoshop palimpsests of the Iam Dulcis poem. This is a huge amount of making and assembling to be getting on with. I have been in very early each morning this week and have stayed late after college to create extra studio time to plan into my work schedule. I have got everything planned down to the minute for the remainder of the project up to deadline and have even managed to squeeze in an elective life drawing session last Monday morning – a lovely relaxing interlude, quiet, away from the studio and the sense of frenzy that seems to have developed as this first, key assignment reaches deadline!

‘What You Have To Do’. 2

‘Research the theme of scrapbook, art journal, memory album, mini book, and think about the event you want to record. …. You must show a wide range of primary research in a range of materials.’

Eldon, D. (1997) “The Journey Is The Destination”. London, Booth Clibborn Editions. A posthumous collection of Scrap/sketch books by Dan Eldon – war photographer, stoned to death in Somalia 1993 aged 22, edited by his mother. Dan’s mother writes about how some pages have dark papers pasted on top of previous entries which are scratched or torn away. This seems to connect with the palimpsest idea that has intrigued me from the vocabulary mind-mapping research I began with.

Technical Book vocabulary research. Studying bindings and signatures. The joy of Ephemera’s Vintage Garden Youtube channel!.

Wasserman, K. (2007). “The Book As Art”. New York, Princeton Architectural Press. Essays relating to the book as art – esp. from feminist/women’s perspective plus images and interpretation referencing the collection of books in the National Collection of Women in the arts.

Studying Krystyna Wasserman, M.L. Van Nice, Kazuko Watanabe.
Studying essays by Johanna Drucker & K. Wasserman and book examples by Julie Chen and Brenda Watson.

Also, following on from the textile workshops, and knowing that I want to develop pieces begun here further, I have been thinking about my late Grandma and her experience as a WI sewing instructor…… this has led to reading about the history of Denman College.
https://www.denman.org.uk/

Meech, S. (2009) Connecting Art To Stitch. London, Anova Books Company Ltd. Analyses and explores the relationship between fine art methodologies and textile techniques.