Back in the bindery

It's been a long time between posts. Somehow January's good intentions dissolved in a mid-summer heatwave that was followed by an invasion of more than twenty house guests over a two week period.
Since then I've been travelling in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia but have now returned with a brain bulging with ideas for new projects and a suitcase bulging with materials that I intend to use in some of these projects. First up will hopefully be a work incorporating some images of socialist posters collected during my travels, including (above) Determined to harvest a great Winter-Spring crop, Militia women exterminate the USAF. Watch this space!

Finishing Off

January at BEMBindery has so far been spent wrapping up stalled projects from 2012 to make way for the half-formed ideas that hopefully will turn into 2013's new works.
DEATHMASK is one of these stalled projects. It started in the second half of 2012 under a different working title, changed its form after I was unable to secure all the copyright permissions I needed and then sat gathering dust in a corner for a couple of months. I picked it up again last week without much enthusiasm but had great fun yesterday with some relief lettering on an inlay panel for the lid of a box that will house the finished work.

Season's Greetings

It's that time in December when anything in the bindery that is not finished now won't get wrapped up until next year.
This week's image is of multiple copies of BEMBindery's 2012 Christmas card. The card features a photograph of Curtains, a work that gave me great pleasure in the making. Its components parts have been posted around the world to their new owners and the card is a satisfying reminder of the work's brief existence.
I'm now going to take a break for a few weeks to spend time with family, get in some bushwalking and sea kayaking and just lie on the beach for a bit. I hope to be back towards the end of January.

Booked and Bound - 3

Just back from a few weeks out bush in time to wrap up the 'Booked and Bound' postings before Christmas. This one is to a design by Dee Carrington that she calls her 'Tags and Pockets' book. Although the materials used are a little too 'floral' for my male liking, I found the structure intriguing and would like to explore it further at some stage. The spine consists of a series of dowels with each signature (the plain green bits in the photo at left) wrapped around and attached to one of these dowels. The dowels are then joined by the use of wrap around pieces (the narrow patterned bands in the photo) that each attach to two consecutive signatures. The whole is then held in place by cords interlaced around the dowels at the head and tail of the book. It was by far the most complicated of the books on offer at the Mogo weekend and I must say that I was impressed not only with Dee's ability to conceive a work of such complexity but also to teach it to others.

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.