Learning New Bindings

This is my latest book. The paper on the cover is handmade mulberry that I bought in Sydney at Shop Kraft. Inside the cover I used paper from Amazing Paper, which I think is hairy abaca paper, but I’m not 100% on that.

The binding is waxed linen thread over leather tapes. I taught myself how it is done, and as such take full responsibility for any mistakes or misinterpretations of the  instructions. I used two books to guide me, reading Keith Smith’s first volume as an initial introduction, but following the lovely diagrams and instructions in Cover to Cover, by Shereen LaPlantz.

It’s not too bad for a first attempt, although the stitches aren’t as even as I would like them to be. I found the signatures needed a bit more juggling and manoeuvring than with a coptic, which probably implies I was doing it all wrong!

I’m trying out a few different bindings at the moment as I have some books with clay covers planned. These will be heavier than usual covers, and so I need to be sure the binding will support the extra weight.

During the week, as part of the process of getting ready to make the clay covers, I recycled some old porcelain clay that had dried out. It’s nearly two years since I finished my masters and I haven’t done any work with clay since then.

The dried clay had to be broken up into small pieces and soaked in water (slaking) until a thick, wet, sticky mass is created. Then it is set out on plaster to have the moisture sucked back out, till it reaches just the right level of hydration and plasticity for handling.

This whole process takes a number of days and wow! was that physically-demanding! I was rather amazed to think how much of this sort of thing I used to be able to do. It’s a bit scary to think about. In future, I think I might just go right ahead and buy a lovely new workable bag of clay and forget about recycling. My energy is too precious!

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.

Installation - wip

At the end of August I made a short trip to Melbourne to present at a tutorial and to see my supervisor at RMIT Uni. The trip went well, and it was great to have a space to set up my installation work and get a much better feel for it.

Although I have s p a c e in my workshop, it is definitely a garage, and it does seem to suck the emotion out of work, and make it hard for me to tell whether things are working as they should. A huge white room like Marion Borgelt's studio would be great, but even a small blankish space like the one in this video would be fine.

This is the work I presented for critique (sorry it's a bit dark). Or I should say, I tried to present this work... I set the work up the day before the tut in order to try out a few different spaces and arrangements, and discuss it with my supervisor. Unfortunately the next morning when I arrived with the class and the course coordinator we discovered that a somewhat overzealous cleaner had "tidied" away the crucial shards from the floor! Ah well! It seems that what consitutes art, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder....

Thankfully I took the time the day before to document the work. The photos, together with what was left of the work enabled people to give me some valuable feedback. There is a bit of tweeking to do, but generally the work went down well and I'll be able to include it in my masters.

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.

Back in the Studio

This week is my first back in the studio. Things are serious as this semester is my absolute last chance to complete the masters. Despite the pressure I'm trying to enjoy myself, and I am looking forward to some dedicated time making.

I'm also trying to keep a bit of balance - I have set aside 1 day each week to spend with my husband, as well as a weekly visit to my mother plus 1 other social "contact" each week. I am aiming for 3 solid days of working, (of course, when I say day, I mean "CFS day" which is highly variable, but for me is a maximum of 4 hours work, starting somewhere between 11am and 2pm) and the remaining day is for whatever seems most pressing that week - it might be physical rest, it might be housework or cooking, or maybe more time in the studio.

I am hoping that the time with my husband and friends will de-stress me enough to allow me to keep this up. I guess I will know how I am going in a few weeks. I know 3 days working doesn't look that much, but I know my limits, and I know that the pressure can get to me pretty quickly. I start to feel exhausted and then the migraines start. Will it be enough? I honestly don't know, but I know I'll have to be disciplined and intelligent in my approach, as well as having a good dose of luck!

Anyway, I was pretty happy with the progress I made this week. I tidied up the clay pages you saw here, and loaded the kiln for the bisque firing. For those who aren't familiar with firing, the bisque is the first firing, to around 1000deg C. You take the temperature up slowly (about 90deg C per hour) until you have passed the critical point of 573 deg, where crystal inversion occurs. After that you can take the temperature up more quickly. Once the firing has reached temperature, you turn the kiln off and go away. You have to let it cool naturally until it reaches a temperature where you can handle the pieces in your bare hands. Any over enthusiasm in opening the kiln before it has cooled, may result in your precious pieces cracking at this stage.

Well, I was patient. I was very patient. But still the firing has not been completely successful. Quite a lot of the pages have cracked, and I'm not sure why. Fortunately I made nearly 3 times as many as I need, but even so I'm not sure that I have enough that I am happy to use. I had heard that Imperial Porcelain is inclined to crack, but I presumed this was in the forming. As I had few problems at that stage, I thought I was in the clear, but perhaps it is a problem in firing.
If there is anyone reading who has any suggestions, I would be pleased to hear from you!

For now I'm off to bed, and tomorrow I'll take another look at the slabs and see if there are enough....I only need 8, so keep your fingers crossed for me.....

In the meantime, here are a couple of my photos from the trip. The first one was taken in the garden at Borthwnog Hall and the second is at Avesbury Circle in England. The yellow is a field of rapeseed behind the girl.

Wraith Detail Shots

More images in coming days.

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 Portraits - finally in progress

I have been wanting to get to my blog for days now, but things just seem to be getting in the way. This is just a brief update to post some photos of my Self Portrait piece as it is in-progress.

I started on this work months ago and this is my first attempt at putting all the pieces together in a studio space and assessing how they are working.

Day 1

These pictures show the first stages of the work, which is one which involves allowing a particular process to occur in the gallery (if it gets that far). Above is the first day: a self portrait made from wet clay and an inkjet print.

Day 2

This image shows day 2, with the clay cracking and the print fading.

The work will be followed day by day to document the process it undergoes. Originally I intended to simply contrast the active process of the clay portrait with the stable, preservation of the waxed portrait (see here). Now I can see that documenting the entire process and perhaps binding it into a book would be a better option.

I have also done some digital photos of the clay process as you saw here.

Self Portraits - wip update: Trust the process

It seems I've been working on these self portraits for ages, and as I look back at past blog entries here and here, I can see it has been underway for 6 months. For quite some time I was struggling with the best way to present the different parts and bring it all together. I knew what I had thought of wasn't really resolved, but I had to actually see that, before I could move on.

It's hard to make a piece you know isn't really going to work, but sometimes it is important to get on with it and trust that inspiration will hit and allow you to take it where it needs to go. I find this even harder given that my energy is limited and I don't really want to waste it. Not to mention having a lack of faith in myself as an artist (I am really an occupational therapist who is pretending to be an artist and one day soon, people are going to realize this and tell me to get out and stop wasting their time).

Nevertheless, this work is one that has really shown me that the only way to make some art is to get on with making it, and work it out as you go. And I have to confess that everytime I actually stop thinking about this piece and actually work on it, significant leaps forward have happened. Will I learn from this? Probably not completely, but hopefully I'll remember this lesson a little sooner the next time I am stuck.


Above:the clay version of the self portrait after 2 days on the wall.


Above: photoshopped version


Above: further degradation

The wax version as seen here is currently being framed. When I get it back, I can move on to what is hopefully the last stage.

Self portraits update - more advice needed...

I want to thank all the people who took the time to leave comments or email me personally to give me some feedback on the self portraits I am working on. It was incredibly helpful and really helped me to fill in the gap that working off campus creates.

I have done a few more tests, and am posting a few more images here. One thing that came up was the idea of at least seeing some facial features in the portrait with clay. Rather than working just with layer opacity I decided to try splitting the face, as you can see on the left. I actually had a lot of fun playing with this in photoshop and trying to achieve some sense of 3-D. Of course, working with real clay and projections would look rather different. Again I would appreciate people's opinions on this. Already my husband has said it reminds him of Phantom of the Opera, which isn't an association I really want.



This is an attempt at simply using a figure and embedding that in wax. To me this lacks the emotional strength of the actual face. What do you think?
















In this piece I am exploring the use of the square in place of a figure. I think this speaks mostly about the materials and loses most of the sense of preservation or embalming associated with a human being in wax. I do love the way the fibres in the paper are visible - it looks like hair when held up to the light - and suggests some new directions to follow in the future.

Self Portraits - wip

With only five weeks till I fly out to Melbourne for my first meeting with my masters supervisor in over a year and a half, I am trying to do as many tests for different artworks as I can. Working in isolation here in Brisbane means that I don't get to show my works-in-progress to anyone and get feedback. I have suddenly realised what a loss this is. I am hoping that readers of this blog might step in and give me some feedback. I would really appreciate it if you could comment or drop me a line if you have an opinion on some work that I put up here over the next little while. I am definitely open to criticism - so if you don't think something is working, please tell me. Conversely, I will obviously be thrilled if you think something works well.

I have started on a piece which I conceived of as a diptych of self portraits. One portrait will be embedded in wax and the other will be a projection onto drying clay. They are both life size head shots and the idea is to contrast the two. In the clay piece, the clay is drying, undergoing a process and together with the projection is trying to communicate transience in life. The wax piece sits in opposition to this - an attempt at preservation.

I am still deciding whether to use a naturalistic portrait or something else - the black and white transfer above, a figurative outline, or even just a circle. Each says something slightly different and I am wondering which might be most powerful. I always tend to lean towards the less specific, but something tells me the face embedded in wax is quite powerful and somewhat alarming. I will be posting some alternatives in the next day or so.

These are four photoshop mock-ups of the face with the drying clay. I think no. 4 is a lot stronger than any of the others, but I am keen for feedback on this too.