Absence

 

On March 5 2007 a car bomb exploded on al-Mutanabbi Street, the street of booksellers in Baghdad and the cultural centre for the literary and intellectual community.  Thirty people were killed and one hundred wounded.  This attack on writers and booksellers compelled San Francisco bookseller, Beau Beausoleil to show an expression of solidarity with the formation of art and writing project Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here. 

 

 I joined the project at the beginning of this year after seeing a call for 15 book artists on Sarah Bodman's Book Arts site.  The number of artists books in the project was to be 260, double the number of casualties and the 15 new artists were called to replace others who had dropped out.  Three books had to be sent to Sarah Bodman by April 30, as the worldwide exhibitions have already commenced.  It is planned to have an exhibition in the National Library of Baghdad and a full set of the books will be donated to the National Library's collection. On both the above mentioned sites you can find more details about the project and see the books. 

 

It was not an easy task to look at all the books already submitted and to create something original within the guidelines.  My first idea had already been used by a couple of other people in different ways, and I was not happy with using it yet again.

 

I came up with another idea to reflect on absence and loss using a mathematical infinity tiling pattern as a metaphor for the intellectual community and Islamic culture, and to act as a map of the district, and was pleased that this idea did not appear to have been used. 

 

 

 These tiling patterns have been used since medieval times on architectural surfaces and in book illumination. So I started work on Absence and made an edition of 6 books.

 

 

The book contains inkjet prints of drawings on Fabriano Artistico paper with gouache painting added later.  The French simplified binding is of Lamali paper/fabric with a soft leather spine and a collaged fragment of calfskin vellum. 

 

I intended the book to express hope for the future with the return of the normal patterns of cultural and intellectual life.

  

Some Good News

 

 

I received notification last week that my piece Ten Books on Architecture has been selected for publication in the second volume of 500 Handmade Books to be published by Lark Books and available in September 2013.  The author and juror for this volume was Julie Chen.

 

 



Highlights: Libris Awards 2006-2010

 

Entries are open until 22 March for the 2013 Libris Awards to be held at Artspace Mackay and this year the main prize is a $10,000 Acquisitive Prize. Details are available on the Artspace Mackay website.  The Libris Awards exhibition will take place from 10 May to 30 June.

 

Artspace Mackay have a new exhibition in the Cox Rayner Gallery from 8 February to 23 June which was curated from the Mackay Regional Collection and features prize winning entries and purchases from past Libris Awards.

 

I was fortunate to have my book Time Travel purchased by Michael Wardell from the 2010 Libris Awards and it is on display in this exhibition.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I made the book in 2009 after a trip to the Pyrenees and south of France/Northern Spain and I really felt like I was travelling back into the past.  The pictures I used in the book were manipulated photos and cutouts that come from a number of  locations such as the medieval walled village of Villefranche le Conflent

 

 

The citadel at Besancon

   



 

St John Pied de Port

 

 

Bayonne

 

 

Those famous mountains that feature in the Tour De France, Col de Tourmalet and Mont Ventoux

 

 

 

Pamplona in Spain

 

 

and a little port near Bilbao in Spain called Mutriku

 

 

It was a wonderful trip and it's great to have this book as a permanent reminder.

Manly Artists Book Award 2013

Un Chartered Democracy, one of my books for BookArtObject in 2012, has been selected for the Manly Artists Book Award and will be on display at the Manly Library from 18-28 March 2013.
The judges of the award this year are Noreen Grahame and Monica Oppen.

Zine give-away

It's taken longer than I thought it would, but I've finally made the companion zine to my first zine Guess who's coming to dinner?  That zine was recently purchased by Melbourne University Special Collections. Some of you may have noticed that it contained male artists only.

The new zine Guess who's not cooking dinner? involves guessing the female artists included at the dinner table.

If you'd like a copy of this zine you can email your postal address to me through the Contacts section of my website.   There are still copies of the first zine available too if anyone wants one.

The Square and Semicircle Book

A Book is like a Garden in the Pocket (1997), like the box, was made by adapting the same Japanese card structure.  I wanted to reflect geometrical parterre gardens, also a product of  ideas and ingenuity, so it was appropriate to use the square and semicircle pattern as a starting point.

Back then I was very keen to use the materials of illuminated manuscripts, and in this case I used calfskin vellum for the 'pages' and made the drawings with a dip pen and gouache.

My starting point was again the same square and circle pattern.  

I cut two squares and three semi circles out of book board.  

The vellum pages were cut slightly smaller and the spine piece in my case was about 1 cm thick. 

Because of the thickness of the book board when the three semicircles are folded on top of one another, you need to leave a gap between the square and semicircle pieces before assembling the structure, so it sits well when the semicircular pieces are folded in.

I first glued the vellum spine along its edges to the outer side of both squares.

The joins and edges were all covered in Japanese paper and the vellum pages containing the drawings

were glued onto the book in the appropriate places. 

I do a lot of work with circles and use a compass cutter which can cut circles up to 15 cm. in diameter but I also sometimes just use my favourite tool, my Fiskars scissors.

Square or Circular Book Box

The book box above was adapted from a Japanese card structure that I first saw in an old book I have called Creative Cards by Yoshiko Kitagawa, Kodansha International 1987.  The book and box above were also made a long time ago in 1997.

I used the card structure for my 2012 Christmas card and I will show how I adapted it into a book box.  The pattern for the card is based on a square with semicircular flaps.

The flaps are folded over consecutively and when you fold the last one you need to tuck it in under the first one and it looks like this.

The finished book box will also look like that. 

 I added the width of the book's spine to the pattern to create a box structure.

1.  The inner square should be the measurement of the book plus 4 mm.

2.  The width of the book's spine is added to create an outer square.

3.  A semi-circle is then added to each side and its diameter is the same length as the side of the inner square.

4.  The little squares on each corner are used as tabs.  You cut through the outer square on one side of the tab, and fold it on the other side and glue it to the wall of the adjacent side to form the sides of the box.  

5.  The semicircular flaps will then fold in as they did with the card and it will  have the same appearance except that it has depth rather than being flat.

(Thanks Di for inspiring me to write this post.)