A Bit of Bookbinding

 



It's the time of year when I usually do some bookbinding for the Australian Bookbinders exhibition. This book is called Pressed and contains rubbed pencil etchings of pressed flowers.  I have used a French simplified binding with leather spine and rolled leather headbands.  The cover is of Cork veneer and leather with an onlaid cut-out of vellum and rubbed pencil etchings with attached linen thread and vellum.

 

 

I have also made a bookbinding version of my Al-Mutanabbi Street Project book Absence.

It is a French simplified binding with a soft leather spine and rolled leather headbands.  Lamali paper/fabric has been used on the cover with the paper side up and the collaged strips are of Lamali with the fabric side up and with some overlaid leather strips.

 

I have just packaged both books up to send down to Sydney for the Australian Bookbinders Exhibition to be held in the Research Library at the Art Gallery of New South Wales from 6th November to 13th December.

 

A Collaborative Book

It's a very exciting prospect to have the opportunity to work on a project with another artist whose work you really admire, so it's been a wonderful experience to work on a collaborative book with Jack Oudyn.  We had met each other last year after joining Book Art Object.

 

 

The project came about after Jack's visit to Central Australia and he felt he'd like to investigate a more sculptural approach in an artwork about Uluru.  We shared similar feelings about respecting the laws and culture of  the Aboriginal people and not climbing Uluru, but as I have not visited Uluru, Jack took responsibility for the content of the book and I played with the structure and binding.

 

We started out with some general ideas, neither of us pushing our own kind of work too much and seemed to be working with something that was somewhere in the middle and not really representative of our individual work.  We seemed to not be getting very far with it, so we ditched those ideas and started again.  We each produced something individually with a view to seeing if we could combine our strengths and make the piece work.

 

I produced a couple of different structures with folded pages and Jack produced a couple of different beautiful waxed surfaces made up of drawing, collage and painting.  Please see Jack's blog as more details will be coming about the artwork on the pages and his gorgeous painted paper covers.  The different elements from both of us seemed to fit together easily and the problems we encountered were solved, so we set to work putting the books together and made a small edition. 

 

 

 The result is Paper, Scissors, Uluru.   

'Respect our laws and culture.'

 

 

The book can be held in the hand and the pages opened out completely

 

or it can be displayed sculpturally, visually suggesting the glowing and changing colours of Uluru.

 

 

I designed a little slipcase for the book to slide into

 

 

A very enjoyable experience I hope we may repeat sometime in the future.

 

 

Bloom

 

 

Bloom is a new book I've recently completed, made of ten linocuts (and one halved on each cover).  It is a sculptural interpretation of a flower in full bloom.

 

It will be exhibited at the Annual Artists Books exhibition at Artisan Books in Fitzroy, Melbourne

from 14th September to 12th October 2013.