On Exhibition

I've been a bit quiet here lately but some new work has been happening behind the scenes - more about that soon!  

Meanwhile a few of my books have been travelling to exhibitions.  Bloom is included in Bookworks 2014 at the Skylight Gallery in the San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco USA as part of the Pacific Center for the Book Arts Exhibition to be held from 21 June to 6th September 2014.

The other day I received the catalogue of the Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here exhibition that was held at the Center for Book Arts in New York  last year and included my book Absence.  This exhibition has now opened at the Central Library of Rochester and Monroe County, Rochester, New York, USA from 2 June to 2 September 2014.  It's always great when your books just keep travelling and appearing in exhibitions!

Paper, Scissors, Uluru is a collaborative book I made last year with Jack Oudyn.  It's just had an outing at the Art on Show Awards at Mackay in Queensland, presented by the Mackay Show Association from 16 - 19 June 2014.  It was exhibited in the Artspace Mackay Artist Book Award section.

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.