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.