Joan
I have been making a second, updated, edition of my book ‘Single Supplement’.
It’s about the experience of travelling alone and it is about the poor treatment meted out to solo travellers and people dining or drinking on their own. Hotels and shipping lines routinely charge guests extra for their stay in the smallest, most miserable, rooms and cabins – it’s known as the ’single supplement’. I have made an irregular concertina book because I wanted to have some narrow pages and hidden folds to represent the cramped, unpleasant places often reserved for solo travellers in hotels and restaurants. There is a distinct asymmetry, not just in the experiences of solo travellers/diners and couples or families, but in the power relationships between customers and hotel and restaurant owners. In 2023, the Café Royal in London decided to charge solo diners twice as much as they would normally pay, on the basis that they were losing significant revenue when people eating on their own took up a table for two.
Patti
I decided to look at Asymmetry from a different perspective – that of relationships going awry. Based on my poem, Burn, it is scattered with text and hand drawn and photographic images, some distorted. The poem itself is folded and locked with a dagger enclosure (so it cannot be read without being detected) and held in a small pocket on the last page.
Dos-à-dos binding on Fabriano paper with Canson Mi-Teintes paper cover.
Tony
My asymmetry maquette is inspired by an image of a cocoa leaf found in an Inca tomb, part of half a garland and being half is asymmetrical. I combined this with the idea of time passing and the asymmetrical nature of life.
When we’re young our bodies are almost invisible to us, as we age we become more aware of their dis/functioning – aches, pains etc. They become opaque. The poem (which you can read here) discusses what is lost and what is gained as we grow older. One of the pages is pierced allowing the light and colours of the leaf to show through and gives the occasional glimpse of the handwriting on the page behind. I used my own writing as it has a scrappy, asymmetric, feel with suited the theme.
The covers revealed a serendipitous connecting of enlarged hand writing which allied with each other as they were opened out. Tamar observed that the shape and colours made it feel like a historical artefact. Which was a very pleasing comment as a lot of my work revolves around found old objects.
Alison
What could be more symmetrical then a traditional book format? For this theme I wanted to challenge that presumption and create a book that had asymmetry as its central premise. Buried in its pages are synonyms I found for asymmetry, which are often surprisingly negative. Why would asymmetry be considered a negative attribute?
Isi
For this month’s theme, asymmetry, I did not use any words in this artist book. A first for me, even if I generally work on themes around discourse! This time I challenged myself to illustrate this theme by drawing asymmetric shapes mixed with collage.
