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. 

Merry Christmas

With very best wishes for a very Merry Christmas

and a wonderful New Year.

A Unique Piece of Leather

It has been very quiet here as I have been occupied by other things, however I hope to be working and posting regularly about my books again.

I made a small book a few months ago called Makes No Sense about World War 1.  It proved to be popular and the edition of 20 have all gone.  As the topic of war seems to be one of my favourite subjects, I decided to make a unique copy for myself.

I sewed the book together in sections and put a black leather spine on it.  I wondered what to do with the cover and remembered I had a great piece of leather stashed away that I had bought as a dud  faulty piece because the black dye had not penetrated fully and had left a kind of tie-dye mark in one or two areas of the skin.  I thought it looked great and decided to use it for the covers of this book.

The front cover (above) also had two holes in the leather which I filled with
red acrylic paint.

Below is a view of the pattern on the back cover.

The final view shows the completed book covers.

Troops Depart for War

It seems I'm still not ready to be finished with commenting on World War I.  

It came to my attention recently that the letters DIE are part of the word 'SOLDIER'.

I've made a few books about the unbelievable loss of life by soldiers serving in WW1 and I couldn't resist making a little zine using this.

I printed an A4 Kraft paper page with the word Soldier in murky green and highlighted the letters DIE in black.  I placed the words in columns like a battalion marching off to war.

The page was then folded and placed into a Kraft card cover onto which I 

glued an image of a WWI commemorative stamp which carries the words 'Troops Depart'.

I'd be delighted to send one to anyone who sends me their postal address.  You can contact me by email through my website. 

Slim Chance

Last year I was very fortunate to work on a collaborative book with Jack Oudyn called Chance.  We really enjoyed working on that project and we'd both found the working method of the collaboration quite exciting.   We decided to use the same method and follow it up with another book related to 'Chance' this year.  We had been hoping to have it finished for the SLQ Book Fair in late June, but unfortunately I wasn't able to finish my pages in time due to the death of my mother.

Jack and I had been talking about the plight of refugees no longer being resettled in Australia and facing very uncertain futures.  We found this an interesting 'chance' topic and decided to use the same Kraft brown paper for the pages and the same Kraft card cover in a dos-a-dos format. Once again we exchanged alternate lines of text by email and  both responded with a drawing.  We agreed to use fresh turmeric, gesso, gouache, pencil.

Jack had used fresh turmeric in his work previously and suggested that we try using it and making a book which had an exotic spicy odour.   We found the pages did have a nice smell when they were finished, but even after keeping them in a sealed plastic bag, after a week or so the odour disappeared.  However the fresh turmeric was interesting to use as an art material and Jack used it very successfully in his work.  This is my favourite page of his, one I find powerful and beautiful.

A choice of freedom or death.  Jack Oudyn 

I experimented with turmeric but used less in the end as I wanted the blue of the sea to be predominant in my pages.   I started with the chance marks that resulted from a chopstick dipped in gesso and some of them looked a bit like jellyfish.  I had hoped they'd give some idea of movement through the water. One of my pages was inspired by a shot in the intro to the tv show The Vikings.

 A risky journey in a leaky boat.  Helen Malone

A choice of freedom or death.  Helen Malone

Jack produced some wonderful restrained drawings and I am so impressed with the way he was able to abstract the theme.  We included two lines from the second verse of our national anthem which say  For those who've come across the seas

We've boundless plains to share.

We've boundless plains to share.  Jack Oudyn

For those who've come across the seas.  Helen Malone

On each of our pages, there are a couple of words that have been translated into one of  a number of different languages.

 A land of hope on the horizon.  Jack Oudyn

For the cover, Jack made little embossings of a boat to which we added colour and he also found some reflective material to use for the cross.
Last time we made only one original of Chance which was acquired by the Manly Library in Sydney, however this time we thought ahead and made four originals, and I think two of them will remain in our own collections.
  

The Thirty Six Views of the Eiffel Tower

 

I was on the lower level of the Queensland Art Gallery last week when I was surprised to see a display case containing some books. Inside was a new acquisition for the QAG, a copy of the original 1902 edition of Henri Riviere's book of lithographs called Les Trente-Six Vues de la Tour Eiffel. Nine of the lithographs were also framed and displayed on an adjoining wall.

I was quite excited to see this as I have a copy of the book reprinted by Chronicle books and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in 2010 which I bought from the bookshop in the Louvre when I was staying with a Parisian friend in 2011. I was enchanted by these thirty six lithographs of Paris from the 1880's and 1890's.  

While visiting this friend in 2010 I had purchased a little flip book of illustrations of the Eiffel Tower being constructed.  My friend was surprised that I would want this little book as for her the Eiffel Tower is an abomination and she expressed disgust that this monstrosity had become the symbol and most famous monument of her city, and was known all over the world.

It was always a contentious structure with Parisians from the time building commenced in 1887 and I was intrigued to find that this attitude remained over 100 years later.

I left Paris and even France because the Eiffel Tower just annoyed me too much. 

Not only did you see it from everywhere, you found it everywhere made out of every known material, displayed in all the shop windows, an unavoidable and horrible nightmare.

Guy de Maupassant, La Vie Errante, 1890

Riviere's thirty six views of the Eiffel Tower were inspired by the Thirty Six Views of Mount Fuji, thirty six woodcuts by Hokusai, made from 1831-1834.  As I was in Paris for a month I felt inspired to investigate all of Riviere's locations to discover how many still existed and still offered a view of the Eiffel Tower.  I wanted to see how much it dominated the skyline in 2011, if at all, and I hoped to have enough material to make a book of my own photographs - hopefully thirty six.  Many of the locations had disappeared or been renamed and many others no longer offered even a glimpse of the tower.  Along with the views of Riviere's that I was able to reproduce, I discovered many alternative views of my own and was able to make a 2011 version of Thirty Six Views.

The Thirty Six Views by Helen Malone

             Here are a couple of the views I was able to match. 

 In Riviere's lithographs the tower is not always easy to spot and my images are similar.

Riviere's first image

My first image taken at Place Charles de Gaulle-Etoile

                                                  Riviere's view from Quai de Passy

                                               My view from Quai de Passy 2011

                                                   Riviere's view Over the Rooftops

                                      My view over the Rooftops from Montmartre 2011

Riviere's image of the Quai du Javel

My view of Quai du Javel 2011

     A couple of the alternative images of the Eiffel Tower I discovered

From the Australian Embassy, Rue Jean Rey

Inside the Eiffel Tower

A bunch of Eiffel Towers held by a souvenir seller

in Avenue Gustave Eiffel

The Eiffel Tower glimpsed through the Arc de Triomphe

I wish I could always find such an absorbing and interesting project to work on while on holidays.

                                               

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