Zine Give-away

After receiving zines from Amanda, Jack and ronnie, and a lovely bookmark from Robyn, I've made my first zine.  It's called Guess who's coming to dinner and involves guessing the identity of the included artists - some are easy, some more difficult and one quite obscure.

So if you'd like to receive one just email your postal address to me by going to the 'Contact' section of my website http://www.visualartist.info/helenmalone and you'll receive one in the mail.

You can never have too many books

Shakespeare and Company is situated in rue de la Bucherie in the 5th arrondissement of Paris, and is a wonderful location for any book lover to browse, read and leisurely spend some time playing chess or the piano or writing that new novel.

           

Besides standing on traditional bookshelves there are books jammed into every nook and cranny.

The original store was opened by the famous American Sylvia Beach in rue Dupuytren in 1919.  She was one of the remarkable women of the twenties, who among many other achievements published James Joyce's Ulysses.  

                 I'm currently reading Sylvia Beach's biography

          which I bought at Shakespeare and Company of course.

1000 Artists Books

I arrived  home from Paris to find my copy of 1000 Artists Books waiting for me, and a luscious book it is.

I was pleased to have two books from my 2011 Disaster series included in the book, Tsunami and Shattered in the Shaky City.

I wanted Tsunami, evocative of the black waves of water rolling in over the landscape, to have a Japanese minimalist aesthetic.  I soaked Japanese paper in Sumi Ink and water, stitched the variable length scrolls together with a simple Japanese stab binding and presented the book in a leather roll.

With Shattered in the Shaky City, my idea was to show the city of Christchurch falling apart and lying as rubble on the ground.  When the book is extended it looks like this

This view of the book is of a later version with the addition of text which is slipping down and falling into piles in the folds and crevices.

1000 Artists Books is published by Quarry Books in the USA. The images on the pages do look clean without a lot of clutter, but I would  have liked the book title to have been included with the artist's name on the page with the image, rather than having to consult the index at the back.   I haven't examined the book thoroughly yet, but have noticed so far the work of other Australian Book Art Object artists, Gail Stiffe, Terence Uren, Sandra Winkworth, and a Melbourne book artist friend Marianne Little.