I made a new book for an Artist book Fair at the Bluecoat two months ago. I wanted something that could easily be re-created and would obviously be the same without to many complicated designs. I also wanted to use materials I already had or could easily get my hands on. Anyway I ended up with ‘Back to your Roots’ books which are very easy to re-produce and can be made in multiples by making many of the same parts at once.
Anyway after selling them all at the book fair I decided that as they were so popular I could develop them as a workshop activity. The first test run is tomorrow at Arena studio and Galleries. I’m hoping they’ll understand what I’ve done. I think it’s fairly straight forward but it took some working out as what I do myself isn’t always the logical way of working and I had to make templates and figure out how best to use them, how best to instruct and what to use instead of UHU glue.
I like everything the same, or with only slight variations, so it’ll be interesting to see what others will do with the books. I’ve got various materials to work with, they could use any kind of paper for the book pages and the outer cover so long as they use cardboard first. They could write a story or poem, or what I thought might go down well would be to use it as a greetings card for Christmas with a message on the back page.
I think I’ve got as much preparation done as possible…well I was thinking of cutting the cardboard so everyone is limited to just the right amount and then I thought to myself, ‘what are you doing they’re just cereal boxes?’
I could write a list to remind me what to explain and do, actually that might be a good idea to hand out too.
I’ve got to give an artists talk before then though, trying not to think about that! I’m going to print off a few photos of past work to put up on the walls of my studio space and then I can talk about how and why I started working with paper. My work is still in my space from the P.V so I can talk about that too and then finish on the ‘Inner Beauty’ stuff.
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