Category: Blog

Joan

I enjoyed responding to this month’s LAB theme, which was Wild. I had been making a few Flag Books and wanted to do something bright and colourful which would have immediate impact. As you pull this book out of its envelope it just springs to life. Cheerful and fun.

Alison

This is based on a poem by Wendell Berry about seeking comfort from the world’s problems in nature. I don’t usually work with legible texts but this writing resonated with me. I wanted to create an atmospheric scene with the book covers mirroring the solitary retreat described in the poem. 

Patti

I had lots of circles of Heritage Bookwhite paper from a previous binding, and they seemed fitting for this month’s theme. I wrote a short poem about brambles and bindweed, and stitched them into this little book. I backed the circles with some drawings from a Kings Cross drawing day, and the end papers had been created at a Phoenix workshop. A wild mash-up – and fun! You can read the poem here.

Tony

The prompt of #wild from @londonartistsbooks reminded me of when my dad saw us climbing trees on his way home from work. His famous words to my mum were “Violet the children are running wild. They’re feral!”  This became a running joke and makes me think of the long hot endless summers where we were banished from the house.  “Don’t come back till teatime”.

Many thanks to @triciatorrington for helping me make order out of chaos.

You can read Tony’s full poem here.

Tamsin

Moments of meditation

The embossed images in this project grew out of sketches I made immediately after meditating each day. Sometimes it was obvious where the images had come from, prompted by sounds I heard or thoughts that had distracted me, others were more abstract. The images were embossed onto Khadi paper using a postcard printing press from the Open Press Project. The box is covered in Japanese linen and lined with washi paper.

Tony

When the scent faded

For the prompt of quiet I thought about quiet as the absence of noise. This made me think of the lack in senses other than hearing, say the lack of smell. I had a project I had been thinking about for a long time after I found an old cologne bottle in a junk shop. It reminded me of a novel I had read years ago about a woman who misses the scent of her lover. I couldn’t find the novel again so in the end I asked ChatGPT to find it for me, it supposedly having read everything. After a lot of prompting it couldn’t find the book I wanted so I asked it to write a short story from my prompts. ChatGPT’s story is uncannily like the story I read all those years ago – you can read it here.

Gill

My book contains words and thoughts that I made during my residency in Finland, which is a very quiet place without many people or cars; a place where you can spend a lot of time in peaceful contemplation, thinking about and responding to nature.

Patti

The quiet, so unwanted, is the absence of my morning phone call from my daughter; the last one was on 9th May 2024. What wouldn’t I give to have this silence filled, this peace broken, this unbearable quiet gone?