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!

The Big Reveal: The Great Library of Alexandria

The good news is the wall bed has been installed in the studio and I am slowly getting the rest of the room back in order. This is a chance for a bit of a spring clean, so things tend to progress slowly as I sort through everything and try to part with some! When it is all organised and looking pretty I will post a photo or two.

In this post I thought it would finally be safe to post images of my latest Book Art Object edition, as I think that everyone must have received their copy by now. I have decided that the best way to show off books is in a video, and as I now have my website to keep up to date as well, I spent some time this afternoon putting one together. I don’t usually use much in the way of transitions or effects, as I don’t think they usually add much, and in fact used badly can be rather comical. However in this case I used a few and I think they help to give a bit of an impression of handling the book and turning it in your hands.

 

 

And in case you are interested in details, here is a close-up of the colophon.

 

I also want to let you know that over on the Book*Art*Object blog, the call has gone out for our next edition. So if you think you might be interested in joining in the fun, pop over there and take a look at the details. Making an edition of ten plus is a challenge, but we are a friendly and helpful group, and I guarantee you will learn a lot from taking part.

Finally, I’d like to thank everyone who has visited my blog this year, and especially to those kind and encouraging folks who commented. It is such a delight to hear from you and I am always thrilled and surprised when your feedback comes through. If anyone has been thinking of commenting or sending me an email, but hesitated in the past, please know that I would love to hear from you!

I wish you all a happy, safe and loving time this festive season, and hope to see you here again soon. xxx

Collaborating in book art

I’ve been working away on the new website I mentioned in last weeks post, making progress but still a way to go.It’s given me the chance to look over images of my work, and reinforced the pleasure to be had connecting and sharing with online friends, like the Book*Art*Object group.

A great way for artists to connect is by collaborating. While BAO isn’t collaboration in the sense of the individual books/objects created, the project, which encompasses all our books as the group’s response to a text, plus the entire blogged experience of their creation is certainly a collaboration.

Judy & the Jacaranda, which was my first BAO work, opened up another opportunity for collaboration. In July 2010, when I was about half way through binding my edition of 14 copies of Judy, I took a break and went to Sydney. One highlight of the trip for me was the day I visited the Librorum Bibliothecea apud Artificem, Monica Oppen’s private artists book collection.

As well as being a printmaker and book artist, Monica is a trained bookbinder and spoke about her many collaborations with artists. Although reasonably happy with my stab-binding of Judy, I leapt at the chance to explore other options with Monica. With her depth of knowledge and experience, I was intrigued to discover what her solution would be.

I spoke to Monica about the way I had thought through my approach (see this post) so she would understand what had been important to me. Then, when I returned to Brisbane, I posted off one unbound copy and one bound copy for her to consider.

Monica suggested a single piece cover with z-folds. (If you own Vol 1 of Keith Smith, you can see a diagram on p. 131) This is also an Asian-style binding, but the sewing is hidden. I was keen to use an Asian binding because the book refers to the tradition found in Asian art, where the seasons are used as a metaphor for the cycle of life. I felt happy with Monica’s suggestion and sent three more unbound copies for her to bind.

In the end, there are 14 books in the edition, plus 2 artists proofs. There is a Special Edition of 4, handbound by Monica Oppen, which comes with a handmade protective slipcase and ten copies handbound in a 5-Hole Stab Binding by the artist (me!)

It’s been a very different process, but one that has been very valuable. Living in a house with a musician, for whom collaboration is a completely natural instinct, I confess I have longed at times for something similar in my work. This collaboration came along a little late in the project, and next time, I would definitely aim to share ideas from the start. It was somewhat of a challenge to hand “my baby” over to another (it never occurred to me that I could simply unbind it all if I wasn’t happy!) However, the leap of faith that was required was really just another of the type that is demanded at times during the act of creating. I found that there was much to be gained by opening myself to the input of another at this stage, and by the injection of Monica’s particular expertise.

The binding Monica chose gives the book a greater elegance. It opens with ease and still refers to the Asian origin of the book’s theme, but with more subtlety. That said, I think some people may prefer the stab binding simply because it is a much-loved binding, as pointed out by Tara O’Brien.

I’m proud to share with you that a copy of the Special Edition was acquired for the Librorum Bibliothecea apud Artificem. Thank-you Monica! There are copies of both editions currently available for sale. I will be putting them up on the new website, but until then you can email me (potsrmeathotmaildotcom).

Finally, I have posted a slideshow below that takes you page by page through the book. This is for those people who aren’t BAO-folks (who obviously have their own copy of the real thing!) Hope you enjoy it!

 

A page by page look at Judy & the Jacaranda

Speaking of Seasons...

I thought I would talk a bit about my choice of imagery for the Book*Art*Object book.

I considered a few different possibilities before deciding on the mix of a jacarandah tree and photos of my mother. For a number of years I've been wanting to get more in touch with the cycle of seasons. Living in a city, I feel the need to make an effort to be more aware of nature and my place within it. I find this awareness can be both soothing and stabilising. Not being able to get out and bushwalk or something similar, I've been drawn to smaller, more urban acts, like planting seasonal flowers and enjoying seasonal produce as ways to mark the changes occurring around us. I'm interested in things that operate in cyclical ways and I also had ideas for artworks exploring the seasons as a metaphor for change for my masters, but ran out of time to explore them. Importantly, I see the seasons as a useful way to think about life and death, and to help with acceptance of this process. It seemed to me that imagery of the passing seasons could be a useful mechanism to explore the ideas inspired by the poem "Learning Absences" (Rosemary Dobson).

It struck me that when it comes to losing someone and we find ourselves needing to learn how to come to terms with their absence, we feel terribly ill-prepared. Yet, the whole of our lives could be seen as preparation in small steps for those far greater absences. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus said: "You cannot step twice into the same river" meaning change is constantly occurring, one moment to the next, and change brings loss and absence.



When I think of the seasons, I am often drawn to Spring with it's new growth and beautiful flowers, and yet in Spring, there is absence too, we just don't often take note. There is the absence of the branch, bare of foliage and flowers, seen in its starkness against a winter sky. This is the cyclical nature of the seasons that I chose to work with in this book.

I've been aware of seasonal change as a major theme in Japanese art, which I love. You see it on pottery, but also on screens and scrolls and all sort of artworks. I wanted to check out a little of how these masters worked with the seasons so I did a quick google search and found two terrific online resources. The first is the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Timeline of Art History" I think this is really exciting! You can search by work of art, time period, geographical location or theme. There are also a large number of thematic essays across a range of categories, for example there are 22 essays on Japanese art alone. And you guessed it, one of those essays is Seasonal Imagery in Japanese Art.

I also discovered that a few years ago the Art Gallery of New South Wales had an exhibition entitled Seasons: The Beauty of Transience in Japanese Art. They still have a PDF online which was part of their educational kit and it includes an essay and images from the exhibition.



With this reading behind me, I started to think how I would use seasons in my book. The classical symbol for spring in Japan is of course the cherry blossom. I am in love with cherry blossom, both the real thing and any sort of depiction of it. In fact, I happen to know I am getting this book for Christmas, but still, I wasn't sure about just adopting it holus bolus. It doesn't really say anything about me, or my life here in Queensland, Australia. I felt I needed to find a more representative plant, perhaps something Australian. But Australian native flora don't tend to be deciduous, and I wanted to use something that would show change in each season.

Fortunately, nature stepped in and offered up the obvious answer. By this time it was early October and Brisbane was starting to turn mauve, as it does every year at this time. The jacarandah tree, while not native to Australia, has certainly flourished, especially in subtropical Brisbane and Sydney. Like just about everyone who has grown up in Brisbane, I love the jacarandah, and try to make it to New Farm Park or the University of Queensland while they are in full bloom.

In the Met essay, the author notes: "A distinctive Japanese convention is to depict a single environment transitioning from spring to summer to autumn to winter in one painting ... In this way, Japanese painters expressed not only their fondness for this natural cycle but also captured an awareness of the inevitability of change, a fundamental Buddhist concept." (http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/seim/hd_seim.htm) This was pretty much how I was thinking about my book, although the transition occurs over the course of the whole book, rather than in a single image.

I'm really pleased to have started some work with seasons, and I plan to continue on this theme when this book is done. I'm looking forward to reading more about the way it's been used in Japanese art, and coming up with my own works in response.


I've decided to make this my last post for the year, and to have a few weeks break from blogging to mark the Christmas holidays. I haven't been too well this past month and I really feel the need for a break. When you don't go out to a job, it can be difficult to work out what constitutes a break unless you are actually able to go away. Funnily enough, blogging is one of my few commitments in the outside world, and I can actually manage to make myself stressed and guilty when I don't post regularly!

So I'll finish by thanking everybody who has followed my blog this year. Thanks to the new people who have joined recently, and thanks especially to those "old hands" who've been cyber-friends for a while now. Your interest, friendship and support means the world to me.

I plan to take a break till the schools go back after Australia Day, but to make sure you don't all wander off into the blogosphere and never find your way back, I thought I'd let you know some of the things I'm hoping to do in 2010: crank up the new etching press, experiment with my gocco printer, make a return to ceramics with another porcelain book, all of which I'll be documenting here.

I wish you all a beautiful Christmas, a relaxing break and and an inspired and creative new year. xoxox

Using Transparency and Translucency in Books

Above: A look at some of the translucent pages layered together.

In my last post, I mentioned that I am using vellum for many of the pages in this book. I thought I would explain my thinking and the intent behind this choice.

Working in ceramics, I could make any shape or form (within the limits of my skills, of course!) that made sense for the idea I wanted to communicate. So in choosing to limit myself to the book form, the particular structure and materials employed are inherent to the meaning of the work. At this stage, I'm not planning for the book I'm making for the Book*Art*Object project to have any ceramic parts. Incorporating porcelain or other clay has to make absolute sense, and not be about working with clay because that's "what I do".

It doesn't take long working in the book arts to come across the scholarly contributions of Keith Smith to the field. In addition to five volumes of practical binding techniques, he has also published a number of titles exploring more theoretical concerns of using the book as a vessel of expression. Eventually I hope to own the entire collection, but late last year I picked up a second hand copy of "Structure of the Visual Book" (1994).

I have to confess that I am nowhere near finished reading this book in its entirety. It isn't that it is heavy going or difficult to understand. It's just that there is so much to consider and experiment with, that I haven't got far. It is certainly a book that you can dive into, to read what Smith has to say about say, blank pages, and although my plan is to read the book from front to back eventually, I can see there will be sections of particular relevance to the way I work, that I will return to again and again. If you never had a look at this book, I really recommend it.

Early in the introduction, Smith talks about using transparent materials as pages. For me, after working with porcelain, the concept of transparency bounces back and forth, in my head anyway, with translucency. Most ceramics are static objects, so working with books, the whole idea of "turning pages" and the power and meaning in this fundamental action is still very exciting to me. The act of page-turning represents the passing of time in the work, and if the page is made from a transparent or translucent material, then it seems to me to imply the way the past and the future can impinge on the present, if we let them.

In his book, Smith talks about using a number of transparent pages in sequence to enable imagery to be built-up and torn-down again by the turn of the page. He also discusses the way a shadow will be cast by the page as it is turned, moving into and out of focus. Both of these seem to me to work well as metaphors for emotional turmoil, for the way we grieve and do the emotional-work that is required of us in order to deal with loss. I'm incorporating a mix of pages in my book, transparent, translucent and opaque and I'm hoping they will work together to suggest the stop-start confusion and growth that occurs at these times.

Above: Translucent pages layered together.

Book Art Object

While I've taken a break from blogging lately, I've still been making art. It's been a great source of both consolation and distraction, and I feel lucky to have it as part of my life.

Back in August I joined Book Art Object, a group of book artists established by Sara of Double Elephant fame. The idea of the group is for each member to make a work in response to a set poem or novel. There are a few guidelines to draw the works together, such as size of finished work and inclusion of a colophon acknowledging the inspiration and the group, but other than that, we have left our options open, at least for this first project. One of the most appealing aspects of group membership, apart from being part of this special little online community, is the fact that at the end, every member receives a "full set" of the books made. If you would like to follow our progress or read more, head over to the blog here.

The set piece for our first project is a very evocative poem, by Rosemary Dobson. Here it is:

Learning Absences (1986)

Being alone is also to be learnt
Long time or short time.

Walking the length of the house, shutting
The doors and the windows

No longer calling casually over one's shoulder.
Returning to find no trace

Of the other, companionable living -
Bread smell, the stove still warm,

Clothes on the line like messages,
Or messages written and left on the kitchen table:

"We need to keep watering the cumquat."
Or, "I have paid the milkman."

At night, at this season, lingering at the window
Not being certain where to find Halley's Comet,

And looking a long time at the darkening sky.

Text taken from "Rosemary Dobson, Collected Poems", part of the Angus & Robertson series 'Modern Poets'. Published 1991, ISBN 0 207 16864 4. Text copyright © Rosemary Dobson 1991.

It is important to me that any works I make extend the concepts that I have been exploring over the past few years. Since starting my masters, I've been examining transience and change in life, and this has at times inevitably led to works about death. I view death as an inevitable part of life, and something to be worked with and understood, before we finally must face it ourselves. There is in fact so much (in fact, almost everything) in life, that could prepare us for death and make it less frightening, but many people choose to avoid looking at this truth, which surrounds us.

Only 3 weeks after the poem was chosen for the group by Sara, my mother died. At first I wondered whether I'd be able to continue in the group. It wasn't apprehension about the subject matter that raised this for me. I was more concerned about my health and energy at this time, which I view as one of the most important and significant psychological and spiritual moments in a person's life. I want (and need) to be able to engage with the learning and adaptive processes that can be catalyzed by an event like this. I knew I was entering a challenging and tiring period.


Eventually I realized that the poem chosen by Sara and the opportunity to make work in response, were a gift and as long as I remain open, the project could be very healing and therapeutic for me. So I plunged in and began thinking about how to approach the poem.

Inspired by some ideas I've had rattling around for ages, I've taken the subject matter of the poem as a starting point, rather than working more illustratively. I'm aiming to draw parallels between the cycles of the seasons and the human life cycle. Dobson focuses on the experience of absence, probably the most painful aspect of loss or death. In mt book, I'm working with the idea that because change is constant, there is always absence of what was before, and this process can help us learn to deal with those "big" absences.

This is quite a long wordy post - I haven't chatted with you for ages so I've got lots to talk to you about! But before I go I thought I'd share a little of the imagery for the book. I started by developing a digital image for each season. Bear in mind that these then have to be worked into pages, and will change somewhat. Below are spring and winter.








Next time I'll tell you how the book will be printed and how I developed this imagery.

A Productive Afternoon, But At A Price

Last Friday I booked another afternoon at Impress studio to make some prints from my solarplates. Above you can see the fruits of my labour. I don't know how this rates for productivity - but I can tell you, some thing's got to give. I haven't been as tired as I was after that session in a long time. Not good. The next day I paid with a headache and I am still not fully recovered.

The etching press I used wasn't the new whizz-bang one. Since it is enormous and new (read very expensive) and I am inexperienced with presses, I decided to use a smaller one. This operates via a handle which turns numerous wheels. In order to achieve the embossed effect I was after, the pressure required is tremendous, and the physical effort too! Maybe someone used to printmaking can tell me: is a press with a fly wheel less physically demanding to operate? I know there are geared presses available, but they are AU$4000+. Maybe it will be back to the pasta machine after all!

Anyway, back to the prints. There are 4 in the series at this stage, but I'm not happy with the composition of the fourth one, so it may be dropped. My original plan for these plates is to use them in series to create a variable edition, which will be folded to form a small concertina book. I wasn't sure how the plates would look together - whether they should be spaced out or flush with one another, and I won't make a final decision until these ones are folded.

There is another layer of imagery to be added, figures, as I alluded in an earlier post. I've been testing out a couple of ways of adding the figures but I can't photograph my results very effectively and there's a problem with the scanner, so you'll just have to be patient, I'm afraid.

Books...Beyond Words: Shortlisted for Award

I was over the moon to find that I have been shortlisted for this artists books award, to be held at East Gippsland Art Gallery from August 8 to September 1, 2009.

The gallery is in Bairnsdale in regional Victoria and they are planning to make this award and exhibition a biennial event. It is wonderful to see how artists books are growing in popularity and stature.

The work of mine that was shortlisted is Self (States of Change) a book with porcelain pages. I've written about this book before on this blog, as it was part of my masters body of work.

Here are a few pictures of the book and I've also included an edited excerpt about the book from my masters, for those who are in "that way" inclined. I apologize in advance for the academic jargon and "art talk".




"Two works, an installation and a book, were developed from the experiments
with self portraits.


A black square was painted on to a board and wet clay was pressed onto the
black area. A life size self portrait (head only) was made by transferring an
inkjet print onto the clay, which was then cut to shape by following the outline.
The clay was allowed to dry and once it had fallen to the ground, the pieces were re-assembled sufficiently to allow them to be read as a portrait. A clay trace remained on the board.



A series of photographs were taken documenting the process of the clay
drying. These were digitally processed using Photoshop and sent away to be
made into decals to be used in a porcelain book. .....


An artists’ book, entitled Self (States of Change) was the work made using the porcelain pages. The goal of the book was to explore the tension created by the juxtaposition of process and permanence. These are represented by the changing portrait (unfired clay slowly drying and cracking) versus the documentation of the moment, a snapshot of “what was”.



The work presents “what has ceased to be”, as described by Barthes (1981)
and explores the relentless progression of time and change, in contrast with
the human desire to hold onto the past. The images are presented in sepia, a
photographic tradition employed to add a sense of nostalgia (Photography.com, 2008). The presentation of the photographs on pages made from porcelain further emphasizes the desire to retain that which has gone, by its association with the enduring materiality of the high fired ceramic.



In order to activate the viewing process, it was decided that the pages would
remain unbound. They are presented in a purpose-built clamshell box, and the
viewer is able to handle each page and to determine how the sequence is
ordered. The clay slabs were hand-rolled and there is evidence of the expected
variation of the handmade, which serves to humanize the work. There are
cracks in the clay and the translucency of the porcelain allows the viewers’
fingers to be visible through the pages, drawing them into the image....."

Forming the concertina spine

This week I finally managed to get back to work on the flag book. You may remember this post where I showed you how I made the mould for the concertina spine.

To form the clay spine, I roll out a slab of clay. When it's nearly as thin as I want I lie some plastic sandwich wrap over the top and press it onto the clay surface. I can then use the plastic to lift the slab and flip it over, so I can apply plastic to the other side. Having the plastic as a support allows me to handle to clay slab a lot more easily, roughly even, and I can roll the slab much more thinly without it cracking.

When the slab is the desired thickness, I lie it onto the mould and begin to stretch the clay into the angles of the mould.

Below you can see I leave the plastic on the clay at this stage
because it lets me shape it quite firmly without cracking.

Next I cut the clay down to the desired size and then continue shaping the angles and smoothing the clay surface. When I'm happy with the result, I cover the slab loosley with plastic to slow down the drying process and leave the clay to dry and firm up. When it reaches "leatherhard", it will hold its shape and can be removed from the mould. The clay is still quite wet at this stage and can be carved and smoothed gently. It is important to remove the concertina from the mould at this stage because as the clay dries it shrinks, and if left on the mould it will eventually crack.

Below you can see the finished concertina spine sitting on a foam
cushion. Now I leave it to dry thoroughly before the bisque firing.

Finally...Self (States of Change)

I'm really sorry to have kept my regular readers in suspense for soooooooooooo long about the outcome of my last firing. Thankfully all went well and I set about binding the pages. Well, sort of. Once I had the pages in my hands, I wasn't sure about the original binding I had planned.

Originally I thought I would make an accordian book, using a simple technique explained by Julie Leonard in the Penland Book of Handmade Books. This would involve gluing book fabric to form hinges between the porcelain pages. Somehow seeing the pages made me feel something a little more elaborate might be better, so I did some more research and selected another technique by Julie Leonard.

Below you can see that the technique is a variant of the same method. The pages are framed in windows, allowing both the front and the back to be visible, and then hinged in much the same way.

Images from: Penland Book of Handmade Books, p.217
Published by Lark Books, 2004.
All rights remain with them.

Still this did not feel quite right. It dawned on me that I was enjoying playing with the pages and putting them together in different ways. This also opens up the meaning of the series, and allows for the images to be read as both disintegration and reconstruction. I think this reading is a lot more hopeful, and also realistic. I don't see life as a linear path, but much more of a spiralling journey, where we retrace ground, spend time ruminating and re-hashing, and slowly move on.




You can see the full range of pages on my Flickr page, here.

Three Porcelain Pages...

....sitting in the sun

Some of the pages awaiting decals. These are for the concertina book (not the flag book obviously)*. They've been fired, polished, and then re-fired to 1280 deg C and are now translucent, as you can see. The decals should arrive later this week, so by this time next week I hope to have fired them.

* Sorry if I'm confusing you with mixing posts on the two books, the flag book and the concertina book. I am working on them in tandem because there are periods when I have to wait while things are drying. It makes sense it have two projects on the go at once to improve efficiency.

A Clay Concertina Spine

If you've been wondering about the outcome of the firing I mentioned in my last post, it was only so so. It turned out that there were eight pages without cracking, but they weren't my "best" ones, so I decided to make some more and then make my selection.

While they were drying I made a start on the second porcelain book I want to make. It will be a flag book, and the whole idea is to play with the idea of the moving flags. If you're not sure what a flag book looks like, my book "Like Weather" is an example. By making the entire book from porcelain, with no hinges or joints of any material at all, the flags will be immobile.

I have to confess that except when absolutely necessary, I avoid mould making and casting my work for one simple reason. I don't enjoy the process. But there are times when it really is the best way to make a form, and the concertina spine in a flag book is one of those times. Joining all those 1 inch wide slabs and getting the angles just right, would be a very tedious process and highly inclined to cracking and inaccuracy. By making a mould, there is the opportunity to re-use it in the future, to make more concertina spines if this one turns out well.

First step is making the desired shape in clay. Here's a sketch from my visual diary to show you what I am setting out to do.
I made a rectangular block of clay and I am carving out the V-shapes at the angles shown. I've made a couple of jigs at the correct angles from old credit cards to help. Here's a photo of my progress so far.



Surprise! Surprise! I am actually enjoying this part of the process! This is as far as I made it because unfortunately late last week I had a migraine. It is taking me a couple of days to get my brain functioning again, but hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to finish shaping the clay.

This week I've also done some work on a couple of my trip photos. I've posted the results on my flickr photostream, if you are interested.

Tate Modern and the Bookartbookshop

I headed off to the Tate Modern with high hopes. With several exhibitions to choose from, I opted for Duchamp, Man Ray and Picabia. Unfortunately, the day I went to the Tate was the day after my second migraine, and it was just a bit too conceptual for me. Then I moved on to another exhibition about minimalism, and I discovered just how perceptually-based minimalism is. It seems simple. Large areas of colour and form, and I thought I could just sit and soak it in, but the effect it had on my brain was very disturbing. The colours seemed to leap off the walls and my head began to spin. It wasn't long before I had to leave.

Luckily I was a lot better the day I headed out to Hoxton. I had heard about the Bookartbookshop in a Book Arts Newsletter and I was hoping to add to my little collection. For a very small space, there are literally hundreds, if not thousands of examples of artists books in this shop. I spent a very enjoyable couple of hours poring through various books, many only priced at 10-15 GBP. It made me realize that there is a very particular type of artists book that really excites me, enough to want to open up my little purse and let the moths out, any way. The ones I love have a feeling of the handmade. This may be quite raw and primitive or of course it might be exquisitely handcrafted. They don’t need to be totally handmade, photocopies are fine, I just don’t really go for anything too mechanically produced. In the end I chose just one to buy, titled Round the Block by Kate Farley. Here's a few photos of some of the spreads. To me, this book had an aesthetic that is just about perfect - hand drawn lines, gentle shapes, references to the city and the country, human contact, suggestions and hints - gorgeous!

Preparing for upcoming exhibition Pt1

This week I received some more good news about Like Weather, my flag book. It has been accepted into the Stanthorpe Art Prize, another national juried art competition. Of course this means I'll have to put together another copy to send off before I leave for Melbourne in about two weeks, but I think I've got the process sorted out now.

I've finally been able to make a start on some of the work that needs to be done to prepare for the exhibition in Melbourne. I have shown this installation Wraith here in Brisbane in 2006, but it is an ephemeral work using unfired clay, drawings and a projection, so this show will involve re-making a lot of the piece.

The first step has been to take another look at the projection. Last time I only had access to an (analogue) slide projector. During the time the work was up, (about 10 days from memory, but able to be viewed 24 hrs/day) I replaced the slide at least three times because it kept fading. I know now I could have had a glass slide made which would have lasted for the whole time.

At Kings Gallery I'll have access to a digital projector and DVD player, so I wanted to check whether there is anything special to do to prep an image for this. I used this article as my reference. According to the author, it's really not that complex but there are a some things it's wise to do:
1. make sure the size of your image (in pixels) is within the native resolution of the projector. I found this by searching online for the specs of the specific model the gallery uses.
2. set the dpi at around 96
3. if the projector you are using is not an LCOS (Liquid Crystal on Silicon) then increase the saturation of your image by 10%. The one at Kings is LCD, so I dutifully took this step.
4. sharpen your image tastefully. Always better to under-do, rather than over-do, in my opinion.
5. convert the colour space to sRGB IEC61966-2.1 because this is the colour space the projector will presume has been used. Leave your image in another colour space and the colours may not be as you expected.

So now there is only one other step. As the gallery uses a DVD player to provide the image to the projector, I have to save the image to a DVD in a file format that the player can read. To be honest I have to check this with the gallery, but I used Windows Movie Maker to save the image as an avi file. MM came with Windows XP and may also come with older versions of Windows, I'm not sure. It is incredibly easy to use, and amazingly I just gave it a try for the first time a few weeks ago when I made this video. At the time I thought I was just playing around, but it turns out that the couple of hours I spent then were actually really useful yesterday when I wanted to save this jpeg as an avi. With art, you just never know when something you've done "mucking around" will turn out to teach you exactly what you need to know.

So that's it so far. Well, all except showing you the image. So here it is, as it will be projected.

Inspiration

Above: Works by Anita McIntyre, Vicki Reynolds, Marisse Maas, Kirra Jamison, Robert Boynes, Anne-Laure Djaballah, Mary Sutherland, Nancy Selvin, Susan Joy Share.

I have started thinking about a book or perhaps series of books based on cycles in nature. The sort of things I am thinking of including are the lunar phases, day and night, seasons, insect lifecycles and the stages of a woman's life (woman, mother, crone). The structure I plan to use is the flutter book. If you are unfamiliar with this, it is basically a concertina book, with the covers pulled right back, so the book sits in a circle. Below is the model I made at a workshop I attended last year - of course it can have as many pages as you want.

I want the work to express ideas about nature and time, the way it is cyclical and how we, as humans, are a part of that. I've been looking through images of work that I've collected for ways to express that aesthetically, and the collage at the top of the post shows some works I've pulled out to help me visualize where I want to go. To me, these works speak of time passing and past.

In a way, this is a progression from a triptych of photos (below) I did during the first year of my masters. As a work, they were at a very experimental stage and not at all resolved, but they were the first work I did in Melbourne that excited me with their potential. They referred to ideas of the primordial soup, and I was playing with light as an expressive tool.

I seem to be in a peculiar head space at the moment...quite stressy, quite sleepy but having trouble getting to sleep and sleeping fitfully when I finally do drop off. At the same time I'm having quite a lot of creative ideas, and works I've had in the back of my mind all year long are starting to come together (in my head at least).

Today is the first day of summer here and while the temperatures have been very mild (27-28 deg C) the humidity is often between 50-80%. This really saps me of energy far more than the dry heat I experienced when living in Melbourne. The last two days I finally relented and turned on the air conditioning. It seems unjustified when the temps are so low, but then I realised that I had perspiration on my upper lip and forehead just sitting at the desk. CFS has damaged the hypothalamus, the area in the brain which controls temperature regulation among other things, so my ability to tolerate humidity is far below the norm. I do feel better and more able to work with the A/C on. I might really indulge myself and try sleeping with it on too.

Self - A Work in Progress

I've finally worked through all the images for my first ceramic artists book. This is my favourite, I think. Tonight I put together an email to my supervisor in Melbourne, explaining where I'm up to with this work and sent it off with the images: eight stages of the clay self portrait disintegrating. Hopefully he'll agree that they are ready and they won't need too much fine-tuning...then I'll send them off to be made into decals.

In the meantime I think I might make a start on the next book....this will involve some loosening up and playing and will hopefully be FUN!

Porcelain tests

The past 10 days have been a bit slow. My energy levels have waned and I haven't felt like communicating much. Combined with not having much to communicate because I was doing so little, this is not a recipe for vital blogging!

There isn't much to actually show for the work I have done, as it was mostly directed towards a grant application and submitting work for another art prize. Luckily I do have my porcelain tests back from feffakookan (thank-you!) and can share them with you.

Above you can see a photo of the three types of porcelain I tested. The tiles are 1-2mm thick, just hand rolled with a rolling pin. You can see that at this thickness they are all translucent to a degree, but disappointingly the paper porcelain is not very translucent, and it is actually the thinnest tile. For some reason, this surprised me. I had thought that having paper in the mix (which burns away during firing) would mean there was actually less clay, so it should be more translucent. Of course there is the option of adding paper myself to one of the other clays (you can add up to about 30%) but that is not as easy as just buying it by the block. Still, if it is the difference between working with clay or not, it would be worth it.

The other qualities I am considering in these tests are colour, ease of working and surface finish. You can see that the paperclay is a much creamier colour and if you enlarge the image you may be able to see it has a different texture from the pure clay. Its hard to describe, but it is rougher to touch, and almost seems as if its not vitrified. If you've never done ceramics, you may not know what I mean by this, but its the difference between something that's been low-fired (bisque, raku, earthenware) and something high-fired (stoneware).

All the tiles were fired together, and the others are vitrified, but I wonder whether the paperclay would benefit from going to a higher temperature...this might achieve more translucency. I quite like the creamy colour as an option when you don't want a full white, and I am getting used to the surface, I'd just like more translucency. It's definitely much easier to work with than the pure porcelains which are known for being temperamental.

The Southern Ice and the Imperial Porcelain are very similar in colour, although the IP is maybe a shade creamier. SI has a strange tendency to develop these little "lumps". They are funny things and I've never been able to find out what causes them. If anyone knows, please email me. They remind me of those tiny pimples new babies sometimes have. I've tried to highlight them with the box in the picture above. In the past I've just accepted them as a feature of the clay.

So.... a decision....which to use for the ceramic book?

Well, I've decided to use sepia photos, and I'm leaning towards the Imperial Porcelain, but I've decided to do more testing using the actual decals, because there may well be a colour difference with them compared to the prints.

"Self" - update

As well as working on a grant application over the past week, I've been working on the ceramic concertina book for this installation. Above you can see the first stage of the process as I documented it. This is the clay portrait made by transferring an inkjet image to wet clay on day 1.

I've been testing different ways of converting a colour image to black and white in Photoshop. I recently bought a book by Scott Kelby, and I've been slowly working through it. It's written in a very direct way, specifically for photographers, to help them learn how to achieve the look they are after. It's called "The Photoshop CS2 book for digital photographers" and it gives four different ways to create a black and white image. None of them is particularly hard but I only knew one of them and they all create slightly different effects.

I'm still undecided whether to use black and white or sepia images in the book, but I hopefully it will be clearer when I get my porcelain tests back from feffakookan. (She is popping them in one of her firings this week). It's crazy but I so enjoyed making those little test slabs and I can't wait to get my hands back into the clay! In fact, I'm so desperate I've decided that if it's too hot in the garage (my ceramic studio) I'm just going to bring the clay inside into the air-conditioning....I never did like this carpet anyway!

Below: the last in the series

A couple of sepia versions here.

Self "mock up"

If you've been reading my blog for a while you'll know this work using self portraits has been "under development" for months. I decided to post a mock-up of the installation I am planning around the work. I hope you'll excuse the poor quality of the hand-drawn components - you can tell I don't have a graphics tablet and had to sketch with the mouse....they do say it's like drawing with a cake of soap, and I have to agree!


The full piece will incorporate the following components:

1. a raw clay portrait with an inkjet transfer;
   
2. the fallen clay shards "pieced" together;
   
3. a fired clay concertina book with photos showing the progression of the raw clay; and
   
4. the final portrait embedded in wax and framed.

I only have the clay concertina book left to finish. I am working on the photos now and will post some of them soon. I plan to send them off to be made into ceramic decals when they are ready. These will be fired onto the work as the final stage.

I'm also testing three different porcelain clays to see which I like the best for this work. One is a paper porcelain, which is porcelain clay with paper added. This makes the clay easier to handle and to repair if cracking occurs. I've never used it before and am not sure how it will look when fired. Paperclay has the potential to be re-worked and joined once the clay has dried and I realized that this opens up the working time, which would be a great advantage to me. Normally with clay, you have to keep it pretty moist until the work is finished, and if it dries out before you are done, the work is lost. Paperclay could make it much easier for me to do more clay work, and this prospect has me quite excited.

Success!

Just a quick post to let you know that Like Weather has been shortlisted in the 2008 Libris Awards - the Australian Artists Book Prize. This award is part of the largest regular artists book event in Australia. Shortlisted books are exhibited in conjunction with Focus on Artists Books, an international conference with masterclasses held in Mackay, Queensland every two years. Woo!hoo!