Booked and Bound - 2

This is the second of the three books that I made at the recent Mogo weekend. It's an 'industrial' book to a design by local artist Amanda Williams, who coordinated the weekend and ran a number of the workshops. What I particularly like about this book is the treatment of the cover boards. The boards have been covered with 0.15mm aluminium shim, which was distressed by beating with a texture hammer. Alcohol based ink was then applied to the beaten shim with a felt pad. When the ink was dry, the shim surface was rubbed back with steel wool, leaving a satin finish to the shim and ink residue in the beaten indentations. It's a stunning effect and one that I can imagine using again for the right book. The aluminium shim (available in six colours) came from a Spanish company called Artools.

Booked and Bound

Last weekend I travelled (with 44 other book artists) to Mogo on the NSW South Coast for Booked and Bound, the region's inaugural book making and paper craft festival. Sixteen workshops on eleven different binding styles were offered over the three days of the festival. The workshops were held in one large space, which made for a fairly exciting dynamic as people drifted between workshops to check on what others were doing. Working at a fairly frenetic pace, I was able to produce three books over the weekend. The first of these (above) was an oriental skewer book that made use of some wonderful Chiyogami and Basil papers. As is often the way with such workshops, the design decisions had already been made and the materials pre-cut so I can't claim too much credit for the work - this should rightly go to local fibre artist, bookbinder and print maker Keedah Throssell, who ran the workshop.

Australian Bookbinders' Exhibition

I was in Sydney a few days ago for the opening of the fifteenth annual Australian Bookbinders' Exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW - a great catch-up with fellow binders and a chance to look at their latest work. The exhibition is very much about displaying the technical skills of the fine binder through contemporary design bindings. This year's exhibition features the work of twenty Australian and overseas binders and includes two of my own books - one of the pieces from the Curtains installation and The Book of Ampersands (above). The latter was imagined as the field notebook of a typographer out collecting ampersands. Bound in the French Simplified style and covered with various skivers, it contains the ampersands from 223 different fonts.
The exhibition runs until 14 December. Details can be found here.