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.

It's Curtains

Curtains, my second work for BookArtObject Edition 4, is done! It is a reflection on the nature of BookArtObject, shaped by four questions I set myself at the start of the project:
1. The logistics (and cost) of posting parcels around the world means that BAO works are mostly small in size. Is this inevitable or is it possible to produce a larger scaled work?
2. The splitting of a large number of BAO artists into sub-groups means that the work produced is mostly shared only with the others in the sub-group. Is it possible to produce a work that is equally accessible to all?
3. One of the defining features of Sarah Bodman's An Exercise for Kurt Johannessen (the starting point for Edition 4) was its ephemeral nature - it ceased to exist almost as soon as it was created. Should (and if so how should) this be acknowledged?
4. Editioning can be tedious. Is there a way of making the end point seem more than the satisfactory execution of a multitude of repetitive tasks?
The result is an installation that existed for the time it took for a record to be made of its existence. Its component parts are now in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, the Australian Capital Territory, the United Kingdom and the United States.
More photographs can be found here.

The Gathering

In November 2011, around seventy bookbinders gathered in Canberra for three days to share their work, wit, tips, techniques and ideas. The event was a great success and a few months later the conference notes arrived in sheet form - beautifully prepared on quality stock, with thin sections, generous margins and the paper grain running in the right direction! With my second BAO4 edition now out of the way, it's time for a new project and I've decided that it should be a fine binding of these notes. The afternoon has been spent trimming the sheets and folding and assembling the sections. The next task is to settle on a design. No decisions made at this stage except that I will probably use one of the lush hand made Tibetan papers (above) that I picked up from US binder and conservator Jim Canary at the event. Watch this space!

Handwritten Handbound

Spent a few days this week helping bump-in an exhibition that opened last night at Belconnen Arts Centre - a fabulous lakeside venue in Canberra's north. The exhibition is a mix of works by local bookbinders, book artists and calligraphers with the calligraphers taking the walls and the bookies the plinths. Two of my works are featured in the exhibition - Little Bit Long Way (left) and Tinted Undercoat Required. The latter was designed as a wall work and the bump-in was the first time I had seen it hanging. I must admit that it was a thrill to see that it worked as I had intended. For those who might be interested, Handwritten Handbound runs until 11 November.

On concertina bindings

A couple of years ago, it occurred to me that the poor quality of many concertina bindings that turn up at book arts exhibitions was perhaps a result of the need for them to be constructed of material that is both flexible (for hinging) and inflexible (for structural support) at the same time. I wondered if making the panels and hinges of different materials might be a way around this problem? After a bit of experimentation, I made three concertina bindings - Cartographica, Little Bit Long Way and Tinted Undercoat Required - using covered box board for the leaves and gros grain ribbon for the hinges. I had a chance this week to talk with local binders and book artists about some of the techniques I developed for producing what I believe are reasonably elegant works. I also spoke about some of the more traditional concertinas that have peppered my binding life, including one (above) made jointly with a recent four year old visitor to BEMBindery. It seemed to go well but, as is always the way with such talks, I came away feeling that there were things I forgot to say, things that could have been better expressed and a resolve to be a bit sharper next time.