Merry Christmas

Every Christmas for about thirty years I used to make handmade Christmas cards to exchange with many friends who also did the same thing.   Sadly, in the past few years most of us have stopped doing this.

It seems that the most popular of these cards were two that I made in 2004 and 2005 from perspex.

In 2004 I etched a piece of perspex with a Christmas tree and finished off the edges with some copper foil that I used in stained glass making. 

 In 2005 after etching the perspex I glued on an arch-shaped fragment from a canvas painting to form a stained glass window.

   Holes were then drilled and fishing line attached to enable the cards to be hung. 

While many paper/card Christmas greetings tend to get thrown out after Christmas (or go into recycling bins) it's very pleasing to know that these two were kept by a number of people and reappear every year as a Christmas decoration.

Merry Christmas 2021

Between the Sheets

Between the Sheets: Artists' Books Exhibition 2017 

will be presented by Gallery East in conjunction with Gallery Central in Perth, Western Australia from 18 March to the 8 April 2017.

Two of my books will be on exhibition.   

The Legacy of Silence  (2016)

I wrote a post about this book on my blog in August 2016 here.

and The Sunken Boat (2016) 

This piece is a reworking of a book sculpture called Rimbaud's Drunken Boat which had been on exhibition in France and was suitable for that exhibition with it's French themed poetry connection.

For this exhibition I reworked the etching on the perspex pages (moving currents, waves, water, seaweed, fish, debris) making it more dense and filled the gaps on each page with crosses referencing lives lost at sea - a reflection on refugees who have lost their lives in Australian waters. 

Delires de Livres

I am very pleased to have been invited to participate in Delires de Livres once again.  

I have been an exhibitor a number of times when the exhibition was held in the wonderful old Collegiale St Andre in Chartres in France.  However the organisers were no longer able to exhibit in this location.  Fortunately they were able to secure another venue  - the new Cultural centre in Rambouillet which is on the outskirts of Paris.  The only down side was that the number of participants had to be reduced from about 175 to about 65, so a much smaller exhibition this time.

It was no surprise that the book of mine that was selected is Rimbaud's Drunken Boat and is based on a French poem of that name - Le Bateau Ivre by Arthur Rimbaud.  The book is made of triangles of perspex and is sewn together in such a way that it is flexible and can be displayed in a number of ways which can suggest the movement of the sea or the damaged boat.  

Each perspex panel contains an etching which I made in response to a line of the poem and subsequently coloured with aquamarine acrylic.   The book covers are of aquamarine perspex.

 

Delires de Livres 2016 will be on exhibition at La Lanterne in Rambouillet, France from 1st April to 21st May 2016. 

Another showing of 4 x 4

Following on from an exhibition in the Cairns Regional Gallery earlier in the year, a display of sculptural books by 4 South East Qld and 4 Far North Qld artists has been installed in the Brisbane Square Library, George Street, Brisbane.

The SEQ artists are Fiona Dempster, Susan Bowers, Adele Outteridge and myself, and the FNQ artists are Rose Rigley, Claudine Marzik, Barbara Dover and Rosie Miller.

I chose to make two poetic works - interpretations of Rimbaud's Drunken Boat and Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil as they are always good to represent sculpturally, and they also turned out to be a suitable choice for the library.  
My third piece is called Into the Void. 

The exhibition continues from 1 July to 30 September.

The 'abbe' Artists Book Conference will also take place in Brisbane from the 16th - 18th July.  There will be an associated Artists Book Fair on the Friday afternoon and Saturday.  Details can be found here 

4 by 4 at Cairns Regional Gallery

Rimbaud's Drunken Boat

A display of twenty four sculptural artists books are being installed at Cairns Regional Gallery today and will continue until 29th March.  The four Far North Qld artists are Rose Rigley, Claudine Marzik, Rosie Miller and Barbra Dover and the four South East Qld artists are Fiona Dempster, Susan Bowers, Adele Outteridge and myself.  Each artist has contributed three books.

The books will then be displayed in the middle of the year in Brisbane.

My three books include Rimbaud's Drunken Boat, a flexible book made of etched perspex and acrylic which can be adjusted to sit asymmetrically, suggesting the chaotic movement of the sea.  The etchings on each page were made as a response to random lines of the poem Le Bateau Ivre  by Arthur Rimbaud, and were then coloured with acrylic.

The Flowers of Evil

The Flowers of Evil is another book inspired by French poetry - Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire.  In this sculptural interpretation of the poem the pages are of linocuts and expressively written text from the poem appears on the book cover and the book box.

Into the Void

My third book is Into the Void which I've already posted about here.

Ten Books on Architecture Part 4

The two books in this post, Pei and Mies Van der Rohe are both made with perspex (plexiglass).

Pei's book was inspired by his pyramid complex which forms the main entrance to the Louvre in Paris.  Some people find this modern structure juxtaposed with the period architecture of the Louvre jarring, but I love it.  The glass and steel structure denies the essential characteristics of the pyramid which are solidity and immutability.

To make the pyramid I cut triangles from perspex.  To cut a sheet of perspex you need a plastic laminate cutter which you use to score the surface of the perspex

I snapped the scored line along the edge of the table

and then cut the triangular pieces

Any sharp edges were smoothed with a file

I used an etching needle to engrave the perspex with the structural pattern of the pyramid 

Holes were drilled into the perspex

The pieces were tied together with fishing line and the paper pages added to the front of the triangles

The structure folds in half to slip into its slipcase

For Mies Van der Rohe's book I used photographs of skyscrapers I took in Chicago in 2005.  The images I used show buildings with other buildings reflected on the surface. This was intended to show the spread of Mies van der Rohe's influence on the building of minimalist steel and glass skyscrapers, as both an architect and an educator at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.  Mies was a pioneer of the skyscraper - he designed one (which was never built) in 1921 for a competition and this foreshadowed his skyscraper designs of the late 40's and 50's.

Perspex pages were cut to size and holes were drilled to tie the sections together.  I used a jig to get the holes in the same place on each sheet, and an old telephone book is a great thing to drill into. 

The double-sided photographs were punched with tiny holes and sandwiched between two sheets of 2 mm thick perspex which would be tied together to form a concertina book.

The next post will feature Book 2 Suger.