The Complete Book

I try to teach at the Sturt Craft School each year if I can; they have marvellous Summer and Winter Schools where you live-in at the adjoining Frensham School and attend classes every day for a week, so it’s wonderfully intensive.*

neckoracle

Neckoracle (Know): edible book, stage 2, 2010. Fortune cookies, sacred string.

In other years I’ve structured my class so that each day the students build up skills in creating alternative book structures: concertina binding, Asian stab binding, coptic or longstitch binding and some simple section sewing. This year, at the Winter School in July,  I will be doing something a little different.

I’ve called the class ‘The Complete Book’ (even though Sturt list it as ‘Bookbinding’) after listening to an exhibition report-back by Rosemarie Jeffers-Palmer at The Gathering last year. This is now a category in the British bookbinders annual exhibition, and it it meant to differentiate artists’ books from conventional bindings. Why? Because with artists’ books, everything works together to form a complete whole: the structure, the materials, the content. If an artist book is blank, then it should be blank for a reason, not because it has an artistic cover and the maker will use the inside later. A sculptural book is perfectly valid, as long as the seemingly blank content supports the message.

This is what I want to explore with this class: we will be going through different binding structures, but the way we learn them will depend upon the concepts that the students bring to the class with them. It’s the perfect chance to workshop that idea you’ve had for ages and didn’t know how to bring to fruition. We will be playing with ideas and how to make them material book objects. We will also explore different ways to produce text and images and how to plan books (leaving plenty of room for spontaneity!). And let’s not forget the fun of altering books to make new content and context. All of that in a week, plus a lot of good conversation. If you’ve done my other Sturt classes, this is like an extension pack… it would be fabulous to have you back.

Don’t be scared! If you would love to do the class but think that you have no ideas, come anyway. I can show you that you have lots of ideas, you just haven’t met them yet. This is a fantastic chance for some professional development if you’re an art teacher, and especially good if you’re a printmaker and have lots of proofs and bits of prints lying in your paper drawers. Absolute book beginners are also very welcome, you’ve always proved to be exciting book-makers.

There are plenty of places in the class at the time of writing, and the deadline to decide if the class is running is looming, so pass this post on to friends and family! It’s such a good week, working in the beautiful surrounds of Sturt and meeting fellow creatives.

For more information, go to the Sturt website, and feel free to contact me directly for more information, reassurance and encouragement. I’d love to have you in the class.

 

 

* You can also stay off-campus in the nearby town of Mittagong or elsewhere in the Southern Highlands of NSW, but if you do that, I highly recommend having lunch in the dining room with the other students so that you get to share the communal learning experience.

Book Art Object 3. Quagmire: IT and Lies (2011)

Book Art Object is an ongoing project bringing together book artists around the world (but mostly Australia during this leg of the journey) to respond to a set text in the form of an editioned artist’s book. Each participant gets a copy of everyone’s work.

The suggestion of an extract from Jeanette Winterson’s Art and Lies novel was, I confess, mine. From the moment I’d read the book, years and years ago, I’d been enthralled by her vision of the Library of Alexandria: Continue reading

Book Art Object 2. Paper Wrestling (2010)

Book Art Object is an ongoing project bringing together book artists around the world (but mostly Australia during this leg of the journey) to respond to a set text in the form of an editioned artist’s book. Each participant gets a copy of everyone’s work. This post, cross-posted with the Book Art Object blog, was written when I’d finished production on my offering. Continue reading

String Books, Braidwood

There’s a new gallery in the country town of Braidwood, called The Left Hand. It’s located at 18 Lascelles St, the blue house on the right if you’re heading there from Canberra (after the left-hand turn to the coast) or on the way into town if you’re coming from Batemans Bay. It’s only open on weekends, and by appointment at other times. Continue reading

Hold, or Let Go: Grieving, 2009

When I first discovered that I’d misprinted an entire section of my fine press book, Poems to Hold or Let Go (by Rosemary Dobson), I was really cranky at myself. It was a lot of paper to waste, and it was/is very lovely Magnani Vergata book paper, an Italian mould-made fine rag paper. Luckily I’d only printed one side of the sheet (I’d transposed the poems, so that they were on the wrong pages), so I could do something useful with the other side. Continue reading

Book Art Object 1. Learning Absence, 1986 (2010)

Book Art Object is an ongoing project bringing together book artists around Australia to respond to a set text in the form of an editioned artist’s book. Each participant gets a copy of everyone’s work.

Learning Absence, 2010. Artist’s book of letterpress and monoprints on Kozo washi. Text is the poem Learning Absence, 1986 by Rosemary Dobson. Handprinted and bound in a hardcover Asian stab binding with either handmade denim rag endpapers (made by Katharine Nix) or blue commercial momigami endpapers. Edition of 15, made for the Book Art Object project. The poem is reproduced with permission from the poet and is taken from her Collected Poems (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1991). Continue reading