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Some News and Something New

I'm very happy to say that Alicia Bailey of Abecedarian Gallery in Denver has selected one of my books for Photo Book Works, which opened there this Friday February 15th.

If you've been following here for some years you may remember the flag book I made called Like Weather. The book explored the inconstancy of emotions and compared this to the changability of weather. It was in fact the book that drew me in to making artist's books, because the structure expressed my idea so perfectly.

Like Weather (Amanda Watson-Will)

Like Weather has brought me success before, as it was acquired by Southern Cross University for their artist's book collection, and I am really thrilled that it is the second of my works to be selected for exhibition at Abecedarian Gallery. If you head over to the gallery's website, you'll be able to see all the selected work in the online catalogue.


Another piece of good news was the acquisition of my first zine, Looking for Wabi-Sabi in Tokyo, by University of Melbourne Library (Special Collections) . Among other work, I sent off some copies to BAZE which was held in December at Hand Held Gallery in Melbourne. I was fortunate that my zine was among those that Sue Millard selected for the Library.

Detail from Looking for Wabi-Sabi in Tokyo

I can also show you a photo of the first proof for A Day Just Like Any Other, my contribution for Edition 4 of Book*Art*Object.

Apologies for the poor photo, but I didn't want to reveal too much yet!

There are only a few minor tweaks to be made now and I'm ready to start assembling the edition. I've decided to make 15 this time, as last edition I only made 10 plus a proof, and although it fulfilled the requirements, there was only one copy spare.

Soon I'll be able to post more information about the research and process of making the book, but first I'll be heading over to Sarah Bryant's very useful post about assembling an edition. It has some great tips on how to make the process as easy, accurate and speedy as possible. 

And Something New

Finally, I wanted to share a recent acquisition of my own. You all know I love books, but you may not know that I also love jewelry, so what could be better than a book that is a necklace. Or is that a necklace that is a book? It doesn't really matter, it's beautiful whatever way you say it. 

This little treasure is the work of Barry Smith, a very talented sculptor and artist who works with metal. He lives not that far away from me, in Maleny, with his wife Fiona, a fellow BAO-member. 

I read about Barry's Peace Book pendants on Fiona's blog, Paper Ponderings and was immediately captivated. I love the fact this pendant is a little book, it mixes yellow and white metals that are  recycled, it has that superbly ornate second page, followed by the quote from Thich Nhat Hanh. As a person who experiences frequent bouts of anxiety, this reminder that the solution lies in mindfulness could not suit me better. So thank-you Barry, this necklace is already very special and I know it is set to become a favourite.

You can see more of Barry's work, including some Peace Book pendants at the moment, over on his blog Rustnstuff and in his online shop.

Testing book structures for "A Day"

My deadline for the wedding album is now very close, so that has had all my attention. That was until last week when the reaching of a significant birthday milestone demanded some celebration time and subsequently even more recovery-time....

However, before that I finished binding the album and I am very pleased. It is both lovely and sturdy. Result!
Now I have about 100 photos to print and insert into the album, as well as some decorative finishing to complete in the next 10 days or so. (In case you are confused, yes the wedding has been and gone, and I am aiming for an anniversary finishing date.)

As promised, in this post I will share some photos of structures I tested for my Book Art Object edition, and I'll also just talk a bit about my general approach to the title. However, I won't talk too much specifically about the decisions or thoughts coming from the test structures, as that could make quite an essay!

My title is "A Day Just Like Any Other", which like everyone else's this round is one of the one hundred short stories written by Sarah Bodman and buried in a Danish forest, after Kurt Johannessen's Exercises. You can read more here.

Although this title sounds very like the beginning of a story, along the lines of "Once Upon a Time...", I don't work with narratives very comfortably, and I selected the title so that I could explore the idea of a day.

I'm really interested in time, and when I hear the word "day", my first thought is about a day as a chunk of time.

A day is a particularly interesting amount of time to me. Often a day can absolutely fly, but at other times it seems to stretch out, seeming like eternity itself.

A day also offers us a refreshing beginning. A chance to start over that comes around comfortingly quickly.

A day is the amount of time we choose when we want to honour or remember an event, a person, or even a moment, whether good or bad.

And of course, there is day's mate: night. Or is it really day's nemisis?

Centuries ago, we developed ways to demark our days, and now we can gather them together in bundles of varying size according to our need (weeks, months, seasons, years, generations, and so on). It wasn't easy to wrestle the days into our rigid structures, with our desperate obsession with whole numbers. Some might say that the leap year we slot in every fourth year is a sign that we didn't really win that one!

So you see I've been reading about what we mean by "day", about the planetary movements, the development of various calendars going back through history, and all the while thinking about the elasticity of time.

For the book, I had an idea to use one or some of the photos of sunrise that I took last year while flying home from Paris. You might remember one from this post. I wasn't sure what structure would work best to convey my thoughts, and so I tried making some maquettes (or models). Below you can see some photos of the experiments. Promising beginnings!