Playtime

My friend Jack Oudyn had prepared a number of pages for a book using lots of different methods like painting, dipping in wax, carbon paper, creating folded patterns etc.   He passed on to me a little pile of paper offcuts and suggested I might like to make a haptic or tactile book, meaning a book which communicates through touching as non-verbal communication.

This sounded like a fun thing to play around with but it wasn't as easy as it sounds, especially the idea of communicating through touch.

I kept the biggest and most beautiful page Jack had prepared for the cover. 

I tried to think of things I could do to the pages to make someone looking at the pages want to touch them and interact with them.

There was a piece of pianola roll paper painted black - well that is good to touch and it actually does communicate music.  I had a starting point and a way to move forward.

So I folded paper that could be unfolded, inserted slips, punched smooth holes in pages, rough holes in pages, made some cutouts, roughly scored a thick-waxed page, folded another long page to remind me of the ubiquitous masks we been wearing and seeing everywhere.

I scratched thick wax off the thick surface of another black page and pushed the removed strands of wax back into the page so it looked like a kind of raised text

and in the middle fold I inserted a folded page which needed to be unfolded twice and attached four circular folded pages of varying sizes

which then were also able to be unfolded to create 3D structures.

The second half of the book repeats the same pages going backwards.

So thank you Jack for that little exercise.  It was a fun activity and I may start playing around with some other bookie things.