"one way ticket"

Helen Malone and I have been working for what seems like ages on our new collaboration and finally seem to be getting somewhere although it could be a while yet before we finish. It has been amazing how well we bounce ideas around and get the best out of each other but it also can be a much longer process than working on your own.
We always research and explore ideas and media and usually make trial exploratory pieces to test our ideas and search for the best materials and media that lends itself to making artist's books.
This time I have decided to be more systematic and keep my explorations of different media as a reference for later and even other books. By using similar sized sheets and focussing on content and composition I have been able to try lots of processes and media and keep them together bound in a little book. As well as being useful to the final process, I've become quite fond of the little book as a piece in its own right and will share some of the pages with you.

pianola paper

After receiving a great little book from my mail art friend in Finland, Carina Granlund, I was inspired to use some old paper I had never used before as it is quite frail and brittle because it is so old.

Her little book of poetry was on very flimsy, rough paper but I found it refreshingly unpretentious.

The cover was made from a left over print by Helen Malone we used in a previous work "The Presence and Absence of Light" . It all worked out quite well so I gave it to a good friend who has been "refined by good books".

"The Presence and Absence of the light" a collaboration for Al-Mutanabbi Street

a joint effort

Today is the 8th Anniversary of a terrible assault against the freedom of speech, culture and democracy that happened in Baghdad.  Helen Malone had made an artist book  "Absence" for a project which mushroomed all over the world in response to the  Al-Mutanabbi Street bombing in Baghdad on 5th March 2007. This is the historic centre of the city's intellectual and literary community, where books have been sold for centuries.  Helen Malone approached me earlier this year about working on a print with her. Check out her blog for a more detailed and informative account of how the print works.
As neither of us are printmakers, I thought this would be an interesting little journey.We felt that if we collaborated on this
 print, we would be making a small contribution to the support and
solidarity between artists around the world and more particularly 
those in Iraq .

"The Presence and Absence of the Light"

The print is a combination of two prints, the first is a linocut of an Islamic screen which has openings to let in the light of the world, culture and literature, and others that are blocked by an aggressive arrow pointed shape moving across the screen.

The second digital print of abstract asemic writing underlies the first print.  It also contains the jumbled letters of the words Al Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, but only fragments of the print are visible through the openings in the screen, and these letters do not appear in their entirety.

The composite print has a three dimensional element in that the openings in part of the screen have shutters (or perhaps book covers) that need to be opened when the print is on display.

Helen and I, both felt that we  have achieved making a print which works much better than anything we would have made on our own.

CHANCE

"chance" an artist book 

You may remember a few months ago I blogged about an inspirational talk by two German artists. As a result, Helen Malone and I have been working collaboratively on a little book of drawings "Chance" which we have just completed. "Chance" was inspired by Ulrike Stoltz and Uta Schneider who work together extensively as USUS. 
Helen and I had already worked together on another artist book last year "Paper,Scissors Uluru" so knew we could work well together.
The drawings were the results of work done together, firstly by responding by drawing to 10 short phrases about chance which we took turns to emailing to each other. Each phrase was related to the previous and all linked to the ideas of chance. We responded to each phrase independently and had no idea what sort of work each other was making until we finished the 10 drawings each. We had decided to make reference in our drawings to the style of early 20th century German art. As we knew we would have more work added to the drawings, we made our drawings open enough to allow additional marks to be made. This took us several weeks but as there was no deadline, we just replied at our own pace as it suited our busy lives. 

We met to review each others work and were amazed and excited at the cohesiveness each little series of drawings had. The next stage was to exchange the booklets and work on each others pages. This was quite a difficult process, as letting go of ones private work with the possibility of it being lost was real. Again, we finished each booklet before meeting again. 

We were delighted with the drawn responses the other artist had made to our initial work. We were prepared to lose some drawings or perhaps need to revisit some for a final resolution but this was not necessary. We both felt that all the drawings were better with our combined efforts and different to what we would have done independently. 

Pencil,ink, gouache, collage and rubber stamps were used in the drawings on the pages of brown Kraft paper. I made a little linocut for the covers of our dos a dos format. 

Needless to say Helen and I are working on our next collaborative project which we  started at the same time as Chance but in a different direction. For more images of our drawings feel free to check out my  microbooks.

paper - scissors - uluru

paper - scissors -Uluru

Helen's photo of the expanded book

"Paper, Scissors, Uluru  Respect our laws and culture" is a little collaborative, sculptural artists book Helen Malone and myself have just completed. We are  excited by the result and the enjoyable experience it proved to be. Collaborations don't always work evenly and I was delighted ours went so well.We were both able to bring to the project, aspects that used our strengths and combined them without any loss of artistic integrity or compromise. The result, we felt was stronger than if we had done it  individually. Helen has described some of the actual processes and problems we encountered before we started to make headway. Check her blog to see her great work how we found each other for this project.

Image for "Paper, Scissors, Uluru"

The Uluru experience for me was that of actual scale and amazing size of the monolith istself and the deep spiritual significance of the local indigenous Anangu people. The incredible physical attributes of size,surface and colour prompted us to make a book that had a similar form, was related in colour but also had surface qualities that varied as the book is opened. 

opened at just one page

I respect the fact that the Anangu people do not climb Uluru because of its great spiritual significance and do not photograph certain parts of the rock for reasons related to sites of gender-linked rituals related to traditional tjukurpa. They ask visitors to also respect their laws and culture- Wanyu Ulurunya Tatintja Wiyangku Wantima. Please don't climb Uluru.

Another of Helen's photos showing structure and colour variations

For the covers of the little book I used a fine chinese printing paper which I painted with earth pigment I brought back with me from Central Australia and acrylic. This turned out quite sandy and rough with textured brush marks and I was sorely tempted to keep it this way as it fitted with the landscape but it was a bit instable. Initially I used shellac to warm and fix the pigment in a more permanent way. This worked well but I ended up using some Xanthorrhoea resin from my friend in WA Trace Willans . This worked beautifully, fixing the pigment, sealing it and giving it a soft warm light sheen as you can see in another of Helen's great photos.

tucked neatly into a slip case

more broken

The incredible winds and recent rains have demolished and shredded much of my garden but no large trees or damage to our house. Thank goodness! Sorry no photo - bit sad.

Compared to the shocking experiences of many others in Queensland and Northern New South Wales, we have absolutely nothing to complain about. The devastation of Bunbaberg is just too horrible to contemplate and also the thousands who were just recovering from the cyclone 2 years ago. We sure do live in a land of great contrasts but I can't help feeling that the extremes are getting more frequent. The one in a hundred is now 3 or 4 in a hundred, for some at least. Most of the time we have weather most of my overseas friends dream about.

My garden will grow back and after the rain at great speed in what is left of our summer. The "Indoor days" gave me a chance to play with more little books. For inspiration I visited the blog of my recent book friend Helen Malone http://biblio-tout.blogspot.com.au/. I remembered she had made a beautiful folded book based on a square book inspired by a Japanese card structure.
http://biblio-tout.blogspot.com.au/2013/01/the-square-and-semicircle-book.html

This was meant to be a little trial attempt and then a more "serious" one later.

front cover

opening

As you can see the book is about maps (so why didn't I use the Turkish Map Fold ?) A copy of an old 1596 Venetian map while inside, a map of part of Kakadu national park and also a part of an old forestry map that shows all the different types of trees in this area. I was trying to make some sort of connection between the age of the old European map the old australian map and point to the almost agelessly old area of a part of the country of our indiginous Aborigines. Of course they didn't use maps to get around from one part of our land to the next - they were/are part of the land as encompassed in the difficult (for us) concept of Tjukurpa.

personal map flap

old forestry map

detail NP map

detail National Park map

detail forestry map

My personal drawings are appropriately on the inside of the side flaps and are linked to the other maps visually as well using stamps, images and notes.
























































































The little book hasn't got a name yet so any suggestions would be very welcome. I'm not sure if I can modify this one off to make multiples. Maybe the whole lot on heavier stock and forget about using card for the covers??? Thanks to my mentor Helen, I have made a" little triangular  patchwork book" that works reasonably well.

back cover