slow growing...

my slow book is slowly growing...

in the evening,
the fire is glowing,
our kidlins have stared dreaming their dreams
(we are early-to-bed, early-to-rise farm folk, so kidlins are usually fast asleep by 8pm)

I get out my booky bundles and start stitching... 

the book creature spills from my lap and along the lounge chair

it's almost 2m 'long' already (how did that happen?)

often one of the beastie cats curls itself inside the book coils...
careful not to tread on the pages - good cats!

I pat the cat and the book 

and go back to stitching

With hands engaged, my mind can wander

I am thinking about my forthcoming BIG road trip to Byron Bay Writers Festival

for my stint as the Festival's first ever artist-in-residence

(gulp)

 I've decided to take this emerging book creature with me

(I'm sure it would appreciate a good road trip -
just as I would appreciate the comforting presence
of a book to stitch...)

...

piercing and binding

 I've started to pierce all the sections that have white spines....

I'm still cutting and folding and bundling encyclopaedia pages (so many yet to do) but I have hatched a cunning plan to start binding this monster.... as I will be commencing the binding with the sections that sport the purest white spines - I've got enough of these already stacked to let me start piercing and binding....

Today I start the binding....

ahead of me stretches months more of cutting and folding and bundling and sorting and piercing and sewing.....

slow work

...

slow work...

long hours of quiet work...

cutting, folding, bundling, adding wood to the fire, cutting folding, bundling, watching old movies, listening to new podcasts, cutting, folding, bundling, helping with kiddies homework, listening to deadly trombone practice, cutting, folding bundling, moving lap cat,  cutting, folding, bundling, thinking, breathing, loving process....

cutting, folding, bundling...

more circular forms...

I have continued with my creation of coptic bound circular book forms from childcraft annuals - with what I consider mixed success.... I trialled ideas about double folded page sections: where each contains a main fold (to become the sewn spine) with an outer fold to display the colour sorting of the pages to best advantage....


In the first piece I merely folded over the covering page and did not secure it by any means - it's held in place by the close interaction of the sections.... the piece has a nice enough feel to it (and I really like the way the colours work) - but I wondered if there might be a better way to capture this idea.....

circular bookform created from 'the green kingdom' volume of childcraft
outer dia approx 140mm

so I tried a larger version with the folded pages secured by a drawn thread line (not really visible in this shot)..... I wasn't really happy with the results...

circular bookform created from 'look again' volume of childcraft
outer dia approx 170mm

I refined my idea and process (and selection of pages) and came up with what I believe is a more elegant expression of the idea....

circular bookform created from small section of 'the green kingdom' volume of childcraft
outer dia approx 220mm

the loose form, tight inner circle (which made it a very challenging to bind!) and the rolled outer edges all help make this, rather than the other 2 versions, a more successful outcome.


I still see these however, as being more akin to meditations, doodles or 'sketches' (certainly not as maquettes though!) rather than things that I will make it to my MFA examination exhibition.... The process of creating these is helpful though - I (maybe strangely) find the laborious process quite calming - as the process helps me to clarify my ideas regarding making/remaking books whilst my fingers are kept busy.

intial (booky) works

I have been playing with form in my initial MFA works - these first pieces are each made from a World Book encyclopaedia 1984 Year Book (my last year of high school). In both new books the sections (collection of folded pages) are created from a single page of the original book - coptic bound to form a closed circle.

the first book form has been bound with a twist to create a mobius strip

the second is bound as a circle - an infinite loop
and when I've been playing with the malleable form
I liked it best when arranged in this manner....
echoing an infinity symbol

I'm pleased with the two forms... but wonder if the huge amount of labour is worthwhile (each one of these takes about a week of consistent work to complete) - I'm not sure how much an audience can understand the process involved in making - coptic binding is the earliest form of bookbinding and dates back to the beginning of the codex as we recognise it today (more than 2000 years) - a book structure consisting sewn sections to create individual pages....

the process of binding these structures has become a strangely meditative one for me - and I think of these almost as warm-up exercises - and the end result as small sketches

equally however, as I'm binding more and more structures of this nature, I can envisage them all together in some way - perhaps components of an installation?.... for now I'll just continue exploring ideas of form through the process of binding...