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.

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:

300BC. The Ptolemies founded the great library at Alexandria.

400,000 volumes in vertiginous glory.

The Alexandrians employed climbing boys much in the same way as the Victorians employed sweeps. Unnamed bipeds, light as dust, gripping with swollen fingers and toes, the nooks and juts of sheer-faced walls.

To begin with, the shelves had been built around wide channels that easily allowed for a ladder, but, as the library expanded, the shelves contracted, until the ladders themselves splintered under the pressure of so much knowledge. Their rungs were driven into the sides of the shelves with such ferocity that all the end-books were speared in place for nine hundred years.

What was to be done? There were scribes and scholars, philosophers and kings, travellers and potentates, none of whom could now take down a book beyond the twentieth shelf. It soon became true that the only books of any interest were to be found above shelf twenty-one.

It was noticed that the marooned rungs still formed a crazy and precarious ascent between the dizzy miles of shelves. Who could climb them? Who would dare?

Every boy-slave in Alexandria was weighed. It was not enough to have limbs like threads, the unlucky few must have brains of vapour too. Each boy had to be a medium through which much must pass and yet nothing be retained.

At the start of the experiment, when a book was required, a boy would be sent up to get it. This could take as long as two weeks, and very often, the boy would fall down dead from hunger and exhaustion.

A cleverer system seemed to be to rack the boys at various levels around the library, so that they could form a human chain, and pass down any volume within a day or so.

Accordingly, the boys built themselves eyries in among the books, and were to be seen squatting and scowling at greater and greater heights around the library.

A contemporary of Pliny the Younger writes of them thus:

Fama vero de bibliotheca illa Phariaca, opulentissima et certe inter miracula mundi numeranda, siparis ventisque mercatoriis trans mare devecta; nihil tamen de voluminibus raris ac pretiosis, de membris scriptorum disiectis fractisque, de arcanis Aegyptiacis et occultis devotis, quas merces haud dubio sperarent nostri studiosi, renuntiabant nautae, sed potius aulam esse regiam atque ingentem, tecta ardua et cum solo divorum exaequata ut dei ipsi tamquam in xysto proprio vel solario ibi gestare possent; quibus in palatiis tecto tenus loculamenta esse exstructa et omnes disciplinas contineri, nec tamen intra manus studentium venire sublimitas causa. Maxime enim mirabantur tantam illiam sublimitatem quantam nemo vel scalis vel artificiis machinarum evadere posset, nisi tantum turba innumera puerorum, quibus crura liciis tenuiora, quibus animus ceu fumus in auras commixtus, ut Maro noster, per quos denique multa transmittenda sed nihil retinendum. Illi enim circum bybliothecam in tabulates semper in altiora surgentibus collocati, ratione propria quadam ac secreta inter se mandata permutare poterant et intra tam breve tempus unius diei quemlibet librum demittere.

There is no system that has not another system concealed within it. [my emphasis] Soon the boys had tunneled behind the huge shelves and thrown up a rookery of strange apartments where beds were books and chairs were books and dinner was eaten off books and all the stuffings, linings, sealings, floorings, openings and closings, were books. Books were put to every use to which a book can be put as long as it is never read.

Jeanette Winterson, Art & Lies (London: Jonathon Cape, 1994), pp. 4-6.

Isn’t it marvellous? Everyone else in BAO thought so too, or at least enough of us to form a posse while the others did Paper Wrestling (I did PW as well, cos I’m a sucker for participation).

But you know, when it came to actually making the response, I got stuck. There were just SO MANY ideas, most of which involved altered books, and then I had to move house and studio and my year just went pear-shaped. One morning, as I am wont to do, I woke up having dreamed the book I wanted to make. It seems my subconscious never sleeps. And the book had nothing to do with the Library of Alexandria, except…

except that the internet is our LofA now, isn’t it? It holds more than anyone could hope or dream of being able to read in one lifetime, and just like the LofA, it could be destroyed quite easily. All it would take is the inability to generate electricity. Simple. That was my dream, and my starting point.

So I wrote my own story, modelled on the structure of this excerpt (without, of course, the brilliance of it being, you know, Winterson’s writing) and made a book that is unstable. I’ve done this before; the topic interests the hell out of me.

I wanted it to look groovy (ahem) but utilitarian. So the binding is simple wire spiral binding, but on both sides of the book (there’s also a cover that wraps around, spiral-bound on the opposite sides, so the initial view of the work is of a totally encased spiral-bound object) and the pages unfold outwards from the middle. The paper is acid-free, but the ink used to print the book is from my cheap domestic inkjet printer, the kind that pretty much every household has these days, the kind that are cheaper to replace than fix. It isn’t fancy photo-grade archival ink, and it will deteriorate over time. The final question, the one that lingers in my head on almost a daily basis, is printed on the last page, the back of the book, in silver letterpress ink:

It should still be there when the rest of the book is fairly unreadable.

The images, at the risk of Too Much Information, are close-up photos of my jeans taken when I was sitting bored at the dentist while my son was getting his braces fitted. I took one by accident, and then liked the movement of the fibres and threads. I helped it a bit in Photoshop, just enhancing the ‘connection’ twinkles, but the crappy printer created the rest of the atmosphere by itself. Don’t fight it, go with it, always a good motto.

Nothing beats holding the actual book, but I also scanned it and made an online copy. Seemed to complete the circle a bit. It doesn’t quite fit into the template provided by issuu, but that’s not surprising! Click on the link below and see the book in action for yourself.

Quagmire BAO3

OK, peoples, enough time has passed and no-one else has stepped forward as being part of the edition, so I will share with you my one-trick pony.

Front.

Back.

Colophon, tucked under the red heart.

And, when you open it all up, this is what you get:

Which is basically a broadside of the poem, but you have to pull the piece apart to get to it… and then (unless you want to frame the broadside), YOU HAVE TO PUT IT BACK TOGETHER.

Here’s what I wrote in the accompanying statement/letter:

Dear

At the risk of sounding as imperious as an Old Spice ad, if you’re reading this before opening my piece, STOP RIGHT NOW.

Go and do it. Do it, and then come back here to me. Just do it.

How was that?

I worried that you’d be the wrong audience for this idea, because if you’re in Book Art Object, then you’re familiar with paper and folding. Then I realised that you’re the perfect audience – because with the BAO project we all get to actually handle each other’s work whenever we want to. So I can make a work that is intended to be wrestled with, and it won’t just be shoved into an archive box and pulled out once a decade to be displayed in a single static pose. I hope. Please handle it, and encourage others to do so, too.

I wanted, with this work, to catch that moment of dis-ease and slight panic when you’re lured or seduced into an object and then don’t know how to put it back together again. I tested it on a few punters and loved their brief panic when they realised what they’d done and shared their triumph when they succeeded in restoring it to its original shape.

So I guess for me, this work is not about the actual paper or paper quality (I had to use something sturdy and serviceable to cope with all the ink and folding) but all about process, about making and using, which is why I printed it in process colours

I’m pleased to report that people seemed to cope! I chose an origami shape that looked seductive and was relatively easy to undo, but had a small element of difficulty that would give someone a sense of hesitation. Including the name of the fold as I found it on the internet within the colophon also gives people a clue if they are completely stuck.

So, you see, not deep and meaningful, a true one-liner, but I’m happy with it. I learned a lot while doing it, because it took so much planning and setting (I didn’t have enough type to set the whole poem at once, so each colour is printed in three stages. You do the maths). I also used monoprinting again for the yellow texture on the outside of the piece, so each one is unique while still being part of an edition. I guess that’s called a variable edition or something.

A few more photos here.

Because there were so many risks, I printed a lot. It’s an edition of 20, so there are extras. They come with a hand-sewn paper envelope, decorated with a bit of CMY fingerpainting.

I’m still thinking hard about the Winterson piece. This work sprang almost fully-formed into my head, but the Winterson one will be a more difficult gestation.

I love these themed exhibitions, because it makes me think outside my box, so to speak. Like with Call of the Small, or The Hankie Project.

In this case, I’d just finished printing my second Book Art Object piece, in cyan, magenta and yellow, and had a whole pile of offset paper in all three colours. Cyan is such a marvellous sky blue, and the idea of a hanging book made me want to think about why it would be hanging from above.

I don’t know about you, but if something awful or embarrassing happens to me, I don’t want the ground to open and swallow me up — imagine the weight of all that earth. No, I’d rather something or someone plucked me upwards and allowed me to float in the clouds for a while, above all the problems, until they went away.

And that’s why this book was made. It’s called Skyhooks.

The orange line you can see is my makeshift hanging line from when I tested the look of it hanging.

I had enough of the offset paper to make two of these, so it’s an ‘edition’ of two, but they’re quite individual.

Catch them at The Left Hand, for three weekends through December 2010.

The words to Grieving go:

Friends die, one after another;
Each time a dark disorder
A ceaseless banging of shutters

Upstairs there, in the mind;
Bearing of wings, loud weather
Days, nights together.

To force on the mind order:
Journeys taken on maps,
Attentive delving into

The roots of the language.
A search for the true invention
Of form by line in drawing.

Also, renewal of linen—
Keeping the old customs
Putting sides to middles.

Thus, mind and hand stilled
And with a gentler grief
To draw down the blind

The white holland blind
Like a banner of love
Against that wild confusion.

(© the poet, published in Rosemary Dobson, Poems to Hold or Let Go, Canberra: Ampersand Duck, 2009)

There are so many great ideas in there that translate to paper: language, drawing, form, line, linen (or in this case, rag), folding, ritual, the mindfulness of repetitive movement and simple motions.

I decided to make something out of this forlorn and seductive pile of paper, and once I started working with it, I couldn’t stop. My solo exhibition at Megalo Print Access in September 2009, Pressings: Recycled Bookwork, had four pieces made from this one pile of poem, grouped into two pairs:

This is all four pieces (or both pairs) in situ at Megalo, although the one on the far left (in the foreground, not on the wall on the left, which is a completely different work altogether) is cut off. The first two are plinth works, made of small geometric folded elements that can be reconfigured in various ways depending upon mood, inclination and plinth size.

Grieving 1: Folding the Sheets and Sides to Middles

This is Grieving: Folding the Sheets. All of the pieces shift incrementally in size, and the largest, single centrepiece has an inky black centre made from overlaid black inked fingerprints.

Here’s a closer, vertical view. You can see the text of the poem, again and again, alternating in direction, forming a rhythm.

This is the piece that was hiding in the room view above: Grieving: Sides to Middles. These folded elements of paper are not hand-inked, but run through the press rollers at the end of printing, which gave them a very light, even, almost gauze-like black texture.

Folding sides to middles is an old laundry ritual, where worn sheets would be cut in half and resewing them with the less worn edges now in the centre, where they would get more wear. It is also a very evocative line for me when working with paper, either folding sheets (of paper) for bookbinding or when using origami methods.

Grieving 2: Hold and Let Go

The second pair is quite different, and is site specific, although it could probably be installed again at any other gallery that has white walls

This is Grieving: Hold, and it is a unique piece constructed from a vintage book spine, antique thread (bought still on its Victorian-era factory bobbin) and pieces of the poem. It is mounted on a metal rod that inserts into the wall, and you can view it from both sides.

This is the obverse side. It’s very hard to photograph. Here’s a detail of that page panel, handsewn:

I love the shadow of the text on the other side.

Grieving: Let Go, it’s companion piece, is much freer. It is another work that can change shape at will. This time it was a tree of kites taking off from a book spine, but maybe in the future it can be something else:

Another one that is hard to photograph.

It was very meditative and calming to make these works. A few months later, I made a final Grieving work, and now I think I’ve redeemed that printing mistake, well and truly.

These works are all for sale or available for exhibition. If you are interested, please get in contact.

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).

Dobson’s poem has a special meaning to me, as I have known her for a long time now. I wanted to make a book that could draw from my experience with her, but also be more generally appealing, in the same way that Dobson’s poem itself is personal yet taps into broader emotions.

I decided to use monoprinting to make images for my book. I think that loneliness and grief – the two dominant emotions I get from the poem – are universal human experiences, but that no two experiences can be the same, so monoprinting suits as an visual metaphor. I added text using handset and printed letterpress, and kept the entire book in one colour range: a deep blue-black mix that varied as I printed, in an attempt to create a melancholy early-evening lonely feeling to match the sensation of arriving home to an empty house. I tried to make the visual movement of the imagery move from external to internal and then out to universal.

The binding had to be formal (a hardcover stab stitch) with a personal touch (a hand-stitching in vintage thread across the front). I printed enough copies to be able to give one to Dobson’s family, and they responded well to the way I’d presented the poem, understanding the connection I’d made to the poet herself, which is very gratifying.

Book Art Object is a loose grouping of book artists that shifts with each project. The central concept is that of a book club for book artists, so we pick a text that we all like and then respond to it and discuss the results. I am treating my BAO participation as a way of experimenting with processes and forms that I would like to try, so I don’t think of each piece as something to be eventually exhibited (even though it probably will be!).

Working with other artists on this project has been wonderful for both the feeling of support and also the chance to discuss approaches to the text, which is so enriching to the development of our ideas and working methods. We communicate through our Book Art Object blog, sharing ideas and progress, and it’s wonderful to witness at the end how differently we all respond to the same text.

Book arts is such a broad spectrum of things; sometimes I make things that start as a traditional book idea and end up far more sculptural. In my head, sculpture is defined as an object that can’t be handled. This piece is so fragile that it shouldn’t be handled, and so it can only sit on a plinth or shelf and be looked at. Mind you, there are many old books in the world that can be described in the same way!

Blue is the result of my finding a number of pianola rolls in an old bookshop. A number of them were in good condition, and intact, and so lovely that I have put them aside for a while, intending to use them eventually — or not, because one day I might find someone who can use them without destroying them. This particular roll shattered easily, and pulled apart at a simple tug, and seemed the perfect metaphor for a fragile ego.

The  notation holes, when the roll is turned sideways to its original purpose, reminded me of electronic music, and as I thought about this, my eye followed the pale, dotted, almost carbon-paper blue line that ran along the length of the yellowing paper and I started humming New Order’s song Blue Monday.

I wrote down the lyrics and marvelled at how simple and timeless they are. There is nothing except the sound of the music to link it to any particular time or place. I thought to myself that I could probably find all the words I needed from any of the old novels I have piled in my studio for recycling. With that in mind, I looked through all the old books to see if any of them had faded to the same colour as the pianola roll, and to my delight, the only one that had was a cheap copy of Louisa M. Alcott’s Little Women. I found all the necessary words within one section of the book (a sewn section that is easily unpicked, as opposed to a chapter), and thus Blue came into being.

Blue was made for the group exhibition 3 Chords and the Truth at ANCA Gallery in April/May, 2010.

Feel the Fell was made for my solo show, Pressings, at Megalo in 2009. I often run pieces of paper through my press rollers at the end of the day to remove the excess ink before cleaning, and I keep every piece of paper, because I love the random and beautiful results. They speak to me of the process of printing (especially when I have used packing sheets, and there is overprinted embossed text that is picked up by the ink) and the process is a primary part of the experience of using letterpress, because the final printed product is often so similar to something that can be produced more easily by other printing methods.

Anyway, this piece came together when I was browsing through my high school copy of Norton’s Anthology and my eyes were caught by some lines I’d read years ago and had underlined, and then forgotten:

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.

I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

And the first lines seemed all I needed to unlock an emotional darkness that the ink seemed perfectly eloquent enough to convey. It’s a very specific poem, but the despair is universal, and so I let the marks do their work.

It’s a lovely piece to look through, and until Artspace Mackay bought it, I encouraged people to use their hands without white gloves to flick through it (and now it is doomed to white-glove-dom forever!). You can see white gloves peeping through some of the images here… After a day or two of having them there, I decided they weren’t necessary, because most of the beauty is in the way the soft paper feels in your hands.

I made a box for it to live in, in which it rolls up like a scroll. The box is covered with a black slubbed bookcloth called Cannapetta, and has hand-stitched detail and ties in black waxed linen thread.

It was also exhibited at the 2010 Libris Awards in Mackay.

I also made a smaller version of this book for a friend who loved it but couldn’t buy the original. That one is also unique, and lives in Melbourne, hopefully being loved and handled. It’s box is recycled from an old bible.

Those Who Travel is a very special collaboration by four artists: Sarah Rice, Patsy Payne, Ampersand Duck and Shellaine Godbold.this is a gap

this is a gap

A stunning artists’ book of original, unpublished poems by Sarah Rice, accompanied by a suite of exquisite images by Patsy Payne, produced using lithography and pounced graphite drawings. The layout has been designed to create a spacious, airy feel, and the binding has been kept light and fluid to reflect the dream-like quality of the pages.

this is a gap

this is a gap

Printed on Arches BFK 250gsm paper, the book is hand sewn with no adhesives, and has a pale grey Magnani Pescia loose wrap cover, embossed with the title.

this is a gap

this is a gap

The text is hand-set in metal type, using English Garamond, and printed on a Vandercook SP 20 press in a silver ink.

this is a gap

this is a gap

What you have seen here is only a selection of the 40 pages. Painstakingly produced, this book is available in a limited edition of 16 copies. The dimensions of the book are 250 x 150 x 5mm.

this is a gap

COLLABORATORS

Dr Sarah Rice is a ceramicist and art theorist whose philosophical bent has influenced many art students at the ANU School of Art.

Patsy Payne is a renowned printmaker, and is currently Head of Printmedia & Drawing at the ANU School of Art. She designed the book, produced the lithography stones, and pounced the drawings.

Ampersand Duck set and printed the text, and bound the books.

Shellaine Godbold is a fabulous artist and she did the lithography editioning (with flair).

this is a gap

this is a gap

Available now for Aus$450 plus p&h. Contact me for more details or to purchase. I will send you an invoice that can be paid by Paypal, EFT or cheque.

All money from the book is being donated to Sarah Rice.