Category: Blog

Tony

The theme of choosing a line from a book that meant a lot to me instantly made me think of a sentence from Moby Dick by Herman Melville. I read it when I was about 11 or 12 years old and the sentence 

“Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs over mine’’ hit me like thunderbolt.  

The idea was shocking and exciting at the same time a?nd the scales fell from my eyes. It became a sort of code. Have you read Moby Dick was no longer an innocent enquiry.

I thought the flexion structure was ideal to convey a tumult of emotions and of course all pornography should arrive in a brown paper envelope!

Joan

My response to the LAB theme in January was to make a book in response to Philip Larkin’s poem, ‘An Arundel Tomb’. I have always felt very moved by the final line  “what will survive of us is love”. There are many interpretations of what Larkin intended by this line. He was not a sentimental figure. For me, it is a hope and aspiration – that when we leave this world, we will be remembered for the love we shared and not by material success. The book contains images of the 14th century tomb in Chichester Cathedral, of the Earl and Countess of Arundel, with the couple lying side by side holding hands. The cover of the book is a delicate Korean paper.

Patti

A book which had a very powerful affect on me and was there when I needed it, just after my mother died, is Grief is the thing with feathers by Max Porter (I was also lucky enough to see the play at the Barbican, starring Cillian Murphy).

The opening line is simple: “There’s a feather on my pillow” – and so it began.

I made a small, soft covered, flip book with perfect binding, showing how the feathers mounted up every day, until the pillow was almost black.

Tamsin

Prompted by our proximity to Christmas, I decided to create cards taking scenes from the nativity. I used the cut-out format, which challenged me to produce images that were readable in silhouette form and could be held up within the frame of the card – holey, as well as holy!

Tony

Using our theme Holy as a starting point I continued working on my reliquary project and decided to celebrate St Sebastian.

I enjoyed choosing the body builder image for this work, his impassive, distant gaze echos the demeanour of Sebastian seen in Renaissance works. Rather than depict the actual arrows I used several quotes to reference his martyrdom, including Basciami mill volte, by Luca Marensio  ‘Et e men disarmato all’hor che e nudo’… ‘And is best armed when he is nude’, which I heard performed by Musica Antica last month.

It seemed fitting to me.

Alison

For the theme Holy Holy I have created an architecturally inspired ‘book’ covered on the outside with symbols and the Arabic, Hebrew and English words for Peace. The interior is covered with excerpts from prayers from Christian, Judaic and Islamic texts. Folded up the piece can illuminated from within with a candle. The hand-cut ‘windows’ are holy and the message is both holy and hopefully hopeful. 

Gill

I decided to make a ‘Holy Book’, not a religious book but one I made from holes of all different shapes and sizes. 

Isi

For the theme “holly, holey, holy, au lait” I chose to print autumn leaves on to small sheets of paper using a drawing putty square, and played around with notions and representations of holiness/holly, nature and space. 

I also used the putty to make prints with an urchin shell. 

The idea was to have two forms of prints bringing together earthy and aquatic items, my way of illustrating a holy combination of earth and water. With the urchin prints I also add a metal fish as the symbol of the Christian identity, iktus/Ichthys. 

Joan

Here’s a cheeky little piece I made for our monthly meeting. It is called Au Lait and, hopefully, speaks for itself.

It is a not very well made box and was just meant to be a fun response to the month’s theme.

Patti

Since my daughter contracted meningitis on Mother’s Day 2024, a dear friend has lit a candle for her at Saturday Mass. If he has his phone with him he sends me a photo. I gain comfort from the strength of his faith and in his kindness. (After my recent very painful knee surgery he has lit a candle for me too.)

I have made a “Holy” “holey” book using some of the candle photographs on the front concertina. A cutout in the shape of a candle allows a view of the rear concertina which has photographs of votive stands in various churches he has visited.

Tamar

On silken wings the moths are never sated.

With clothes moths as my creative collaborators (try not to cry), this work documents every moth hole in one of my  jumpers.

Each double page spread has a photo of the hole and then a close up.

I textured the foreedge using pinking shears to make them look nibbled. 

Muslin, book cloth, cartridge paper, layout paper, waxed lined thread

Tony

The prompt ‘Blank’ made me think of how some people hate the first blank page of a new sketchbook or a blank canvas.  In fact it is called ‘White Page Syndrome’.  Artists sometimes scumble the canvas to get rid of the glaring empty canvas and then imagine what the random marks suggest, a process called Pareidolia.

This made me think of the largest of all canvas, the starry sky.  People have, seemingly, always seen gods and monsters shining down on them. I constructed this interlocking concertina book with a blank page intersected by the Milky Way to echo our endless ability to fill in the blank space.

Gill

For this month’s theme of ‘Blank’ I created eight small stitched books, each one with different types of paper. The books are very small and relate to a project that we have concerned with taking impressions and then prints from putty rubbers that Tamsin gave to each of us. The books fit inside the plastic case that the putty rubber came in.

Isi

For the theme Blank I chose to use a paper structure that can hold several folded sections, each containing a letter of the alphabet creating together the word BLANK. It was an invitation to use a yellowish paper strong enough to keep the structure stable,  and transparent sticky notes with a very discrete grid on both sides of the cover giving an overall clean blank look to the book.

Joan

As book artists, we often discuss whether a piece of work, which may be book shaped but without text or a narrative, is really an ‘artist book’.

I tend to think that every artist book should have a narrative and a meaning to the artist, even if it is implicit. Although I like the colours in this ‘blank’ book, which I made for our latest theme, it has no significance to me as an artist book.

Patti

I made a small book in a white cover with photographs of me from childhood to now, gradually getting fainter through the pages until the last page is blank, to reflect on the fading of life into nothingness. I know, I know!

Tamar

I am currently exploring my Armenian heritage and identity. This book is the starting point of an embroidery work, the blank canvas.

Each page is buttoned in making loose sheets that can be displayed separately, reorganised, or read like a book.

Thanks to Louise Bourgeoise whose cloth books helped me to figure out how to make this. 

Calico, cotton thread, faux horn buttons

Alison

I wanted to combine musical crescendo with visual elements echoing the idea. With each page there are more punched holes that get bigger in size. They reveal colours that graduate from pastels to brighter intensities. 

Isi

For the theme Crescendo, I played with two structures/artist books using the vocabulary found in the  discourse of culture wars and material such as paper. The main focus was the experience of “tension” with forms, words and structures so to illustrate my perception of the extreme polarisation that I see in today’s discourse and language, particularly online.

Joan

Our theme this month was ‘Crescendo’. I struggled to get away from a simple image of musical notation. In the end I made a ‘bookwork’, with no text. I made an upward-sweeping curve of card and paper, held together by black thread to represent musical staves. The ‘notes’ suspended from the ‘staves’ are cut re-used prints. They go from a strong black to a white.

Patti

This small book is based on Hedi Kyle’s “Sling Fold”, pressed to lie flat.

Is it about sex? About art? About life? I couldn’t possibly comment. At my great age I’ve learned some things are better hinted at than explained.

Tony

For the LAB theme of crescendo I wanted to explore the idea of quiet drama where the climax of the action is muted and has to be searched for rather than shouted. My favourite example of this the Bruegel painting The fall of Icarus.

The unfortunate youth drops from the sky in a flurry of feathers totally unobserved by the people going about their business in the landscape. I thought the structure of this book allows a slow journey through the painting and quietly builds up to Icarus’ legs as he plunges unseen into the sea.

Isi

Lost in translation : a pamphlet about juggling with several languages.

A polyglot, someone who dances between languages, is mapping thoughts to sounds, feelings to forms, meanings to rhythms. Words are your tools, your compass. And yet, sometimes – inexplicably – none of them are quite right.

Being a polyglot is being at home everywhere but never on safe land instead you are constantly surfing the big linguistic waves. You carry worlds inside you, but when lost in translation, they feel like rooms with locked doors. You fumble with keys, knowing exactly what’s behind each one, yet stuck outside — watching, feeling, remembering — but unable to fully enter.

Joan

I was thinking about all the things we have lost – or think we have lost – in everyday life – keys, phone, glasses, credit cards and so on. This is a simple, irregular concertina structure, with collage, using Canson Mi Teintes paper.

The images are from copyright free sources or my own photographs.

Patti

This title, Lost, could only lead me to my daughter’s loss of sight and short term memory. It made me reflect not only on what she, and we, have lost, but what we still have – touch, laughter and memories, but – more importantly – hope and so much love.

The photographs are of her wedding day, her husband and children, things they have made for her that they can describe to her and she can touch, printed on cartridge and vellum papers.

Tamsin

Lost

I knew that I wanted to play with the idea of being lost in the pages of a book for this theme. I was then struck by the resemblance to map contour lines in the sumagashi paper I recently marbled. I decided to create a book of mostly blank pages, with the occasional page of marbled ‘map’ paper randomly interleaved.

Tony

I made this photo album shortly after my mother died. I had been to India and the press of people made me miss her even more. 

I took photos of places which were empty (a rare event) or I removed the crowds digitally when I got back home. The images fade away to nearly nothing, like memories as we get older or washing out as photos do as they age. The postcard says “Wish you were here” on the back. Interpret that as you will.

Alison

For this theme I wanted to share the search through my house for my phone. An occurance that happens far too regularly. The snake book presented an appropriate labyrinthical format and the photos are all the places I would search and in the same order, ultimately finding the phone in my bag where undoubtedly I had just placed it. 

Gill

For this month’s theme of ‘Lost’ , I have decided to comment on the frustration of trying to get anywhere by car or by public transport these days, in particular, the council’s decision to cover the countryside (in Surrey) with diversion signs. The piece of work is a maquette, as the final format has not been decided yet.

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.

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.

Tamar

Created to mimic an old fashioned flip photo album, this work incorporates a series of cyanotypes created on location in Kingley Vale and Thorney Island, Chichester.

I enjoyed the idea of documenting a walk this way, but had yet to figure out a way to make a piece of work from them. As the notes on the back of the cards were important, with details of location and plant identity, I included both sides of the originals.

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.

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. 

Isi

This theme is inspired by my experience of growing up in the South of France. It is a place with landscapes and terrains that evoke wilderness and an architecture from the Middle Ages. The work is made of paper, inks, water colours, photographs. A fun project to execute for this subject.

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?

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.

Isi

The theme, Quiet, reminds me the calmness experienced within. It is a calmness, not necessarily a constant state of mind, but a mental space to draw strength from and recuperate. Calm as if nothing mattered and one can let go of life and worries. 

The shape of the book is a sober cover to keep in place that feeling of calmness.