Bind Challenge - 4

The Bind Challenge rolls on and the third of my four books has now been completed. It's a response to the query "What were you doing in the year of your 21st birthday and where did you live, work and play?"
The book Letters from Alice draws on memories of time spent as a vacation student in the Australian outback town of Alice Springs. What was intended to be a grand adventure turned out to be a lonely excursion into a racist world where difference was despised and where changing the status quo was never an option.
Like books one and two, it's a drum leaf binding. It will be the smallest of the project's four books, measuring just 65mm x 65mm.

For Martin ...

This week's image of is for Martin, who was taken by a detail of 7POEMS that featured in an earlier post and asked for some more information.
Completed in an edition of five, it's a simple work consisting of a clam shell box that houses eight accordion fold loose leaves (the seven Maxwell Bodenheim poems plus a title-index-colophon).
7POEMS grew from frustration at being unable to secure a 'licence to use' for part of the text of a planned work and a subsequent on-line search for 'poets-who-died-in-1953'. For those unfamiliar with Australian copyright law, the 2004 US-Australia Free Trade Agreement extended the 'copyright-after-death-of-the-creator' period from 50 to 70 years, meaning that new 'out-of-copyright' material will be not become available in Australia until 2024.
7POEMS is currently part of an exhibition at Artisan Books that runs until 12 October.

Guild 13

This week sees the opening of Guild 13 in the Mezzanine Gallery of Canberra's Civic Library. It's an exhibition of recent works by members of the Canberra Craft Bookbinders' Guild and features thirty six works (including three of my own) by nineteen bookbinders and book artists. The exhibition marks my debut as a curator and I've also taken on responsibility for catalogue design and preparation and exhibition graphics. It's been a busy (but satisfying) time and, fortunately, the pace is starting to ease now that the bump-in has happened. For anyone who might be interested a copy of the exhibition catalogue can be viewed or downloaded here.

A Third Lakeland Sketchbook - 2

After a couple of weeks in the doldrums, things have really taken off. A Third Lakeland Sketchbook - a French simplified binding that's headed for an exhibition in Sydney in November - has gone from go-to-whoa in just a couple of days (at right is a detail of the spine and cover boards). Its completion has marked the start of frantic times with two stalled projects wrapped up, a new project started and finished, and the beginnings of another book drying under weights while I work on this post. More on these in coming weeks. All this activity has been overlain with preparations for an exhibition that opens in Canberra in a few days. I'll have three pieces in the exhibition but, more importantly for me, it will mark my 'debut' as a curator. The deadline for entries was a few days ago and last week saw a steady stream of binders and book artists delivering their work. It felt like Christmas!