Here's one I prepared earlier ...

A couple of weeks ago I had a chance to get enthused again about non-adhesive bindings. Caren Florance, a local letterpress printer, bookbinder and book-arts teacher, gathered about 20 of us for a short workshop in which we played around with long stitch bindings. It was a great evening with a sociable bunch of artists, binders and calligraphers and quite a contrast to my fairly hermetic (heremitic?) studio practice. We each produced a binding with limp covers made from recycled leather aprons. Mine was absolute rubbish so this week's photograph is of a long-stitch binding that I made a while ago (but could have made at Caren's workshop if I'd spent less time chatting and more time concentrating).

A bit of shameless self-promotion

This week's mail included a copy of Sandra Salamony's 1000 Artists' Books: Exploring the Book as Art (Quarry Books 2012), which features one of my works.
Details of Sandra's book can be found here.
Leaves of Irony resulted from a light-hearted challenge to produce a book from the contents of a fellow binder's rubbish bin. It is a non-adhesive visible structure binding made from weathered galvanised iron (from the base of an abandoned garden wheelbarrow), telephone wiring and beaten lead fishing sinkers. While it has featured in three exhibitions to date (winning awards at two of these exhibitions), I will always remember it fondly as the work that led to my first ever piece of fan mail. Enough said!

I am curious ...

I started a new piece this week - working title I am curious ... . It's come from a curator's invitation to prepare something wall-hung for a possible artists' books exhibition at the end of 2012. The curator will be working with a gallery that is mostly used for showing paintings so lots of wall space but a less-than-ideal number of plinths and cases.
After working through the usual design anxieties about form, proportions and dimensions and frustrations over prototypes and prototype details that don't work as intended, I plunged in yesterday. Lots of activity cutting sheets of box board; becoming familiar with the properties of a new (for me) Spanish bookcloth; and working out how best to use the hundred or so paint swatches from my local hardware store that will be at the core of the work. So far, so good (I think)!

41: It's beginning to hurt

The distribution of my Group 2 contribution to BAO Edition 4 is complete and copies are now in the hands (collections?) of those in my group.
41: It's beginning to hurt takes as its starting point the possibility that one of Sarah Bodman's stories has been recovered from its place of interment in a Danish forest and subsequently offered for sale by a London bookseller.
The work is housed in a simple drop side box and consists of a colophon, ephemera associated with the sale of the book and the book itself - much distressed with significant staining and water damage and evidence of insect attack.
For those who might be interested, more photographs and details can be found here.
The work is intended as a reflection on the hurt experienced by artists when their work is appropriated by others and used, often for profit, without consent and in a manner contrary to the artists' intentions.