Last year I took a couple of classes with Chi Lik Cheung (Franz) – Chinese Calligraphy at Sydney Community College and Chinese Colour Ink painting at WEA Sydney. I was interested in extending my brush skills; in thinking more about the tension of what is clearly language but to me unreadable; in learning more about the cultural history and art of China.
I’ve tried just 15 of the 80+ sessions, working with brush and sumi ink, but on old, pre-used cartridge paper. The orihon structure works brilliantly to hold the ongoing work. It’s built with a slightly heavier front cover, then the work pages glued on one by one as I go. The “front” side has odd numbered sessions, the other side the even.
2. Prompt Art
Jackie Schomburg and Process Art was first mentioned in this blog almost three years ago. I’ve participated in a number of her workshops via zoom, and found them a wonderful way to learn and practice the Brave Art Process, connecting with others and led by Jackie’s warmth. Each session we would write our personal Intention, work on an art piece, then write our Witness statement. At the end those who wished could share what they had done, knowing there would be appreciation without comment or criticism.
In my current iteration, rather than self care I focus on thinking about and responding to something I’ve read. I take a Prompt – usually a brief quote from a book. Next some relaxed play in marks and colour – not illustrative, but as part of thinking about the reading, what has caught my interest, what it could mean to me. Finally a written Reflection. It’s not a summary, more getting in touch with how it felt, where my mind is going… actually not far from the original Self Care😊.
Initial experiments with an orihon structure didn’t satisfy me. Instead I use one page of heavy-ish copy paper for the Prompt and Reflection, plus a standard size piece of watercolour paper for the materials play. The two are glued together, then joined into a growing concertina.
3. Exploring Practice
The Plan was, to quote myself “to use the orihon as research vehicle – build separate sections, see where the project lands.”
It never landed. It never really took off. Too self-conscious. Insufficiently supportive. A distraction, forcing it. I’m now trying a radically different approach. I still believe I have a wealth of material that in different combinations could create some sparks.
Jacqui is a fellow member of the Creative Research group led by Ruth Hadlow. Her book is based on Jacqui’s research, triggered by a particular photograph in a museum in Tasmania. From the publisher’s blurb: “It is 1924, near Queenstown on the west coast of Tasmania. A boy holds a double-barrelled gun with a bright-eyed black cockatoo perched on the barrel. A young woman with short curly hair stands beside him in the button grass, a dead black cockatoo dangling from each hand.” Jacqui presents her narrative through poetry, monoprints, and there’s also a performance form. The Princess River is a recurring presence, a refrain.
I wanted to slow down, to be attentive, and used the refrain of the river as my text.
There’s some strength in the double-layered and off-set structure. How light can I go? The presentation side is onion skin paper. The reverse is tissue paper, gelli-printed. For a little extra stability a river of tissue is sandwiched between. It holds up well.
The “river” acts as both structure and content, and the ideas for both were developed together.
2. Shibashi
This year I joined a weekly shibashi class. I wanted to express the feeling, the movement, stretch, balance, energy.
The book was constructed first, quickly and somewhat approximately from recycled paper and cardboard, considerably heavier than my previous samples. The initial marks in sumi ink and neocolor II crayons were supplemented with scribbles of text from Grandmaster Gary Khor.
It felt different to work spontaneously in a pre-set form. I went back and forward across the pages, gradually building up my marks.
The poem is one of the readings we’ll be discussing in this month’s Creative Research zoom session. I wanted to learn more about the objects and places referenced in the poem, and decided to use the orihon form as a vehicle for the research rather than a response to the poem directly.
The presentation side is material copied from the internet, laser printed onto onion skin paper. It includes maps, a diagrammatic section of the geology, a LiDAR image of a Roman villa, the text of the poem, a museum image of a bone figurine…
The reverse side is a page of text and doodles related to the villages / hamlets which the Dunt flows through – Duntisbourne Abbots, Duntisbourne Leer, Middle Duntisbourne and Duntisbourne Rouse. A link I particularly like, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRqkm6xwJKQ, follows a walk through the villages. There are no bridges – instead fords, culverts, and in Duntisbourne Leer a wide gutter along the road.
This book was driven by content. I printed pages as I was researching. The decision to use the A3 doodle page on the reverse determined the number of sheets in the book.
4. Etel Adnan – text from In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country
It was Etel Adnan’s work which attracted me to the orihon as a vehicle. I wanted to spend some more time with a particular passage in her book. I also wanted to try the orihon in a build-as-you-go approach. First I wrote the text on a series of individual pages (Yamamoto Kin Kaku Den Super White paper; iroshizuku tsuki-yo ink – a dull blue turquoise that can show a little purple at the edges; kakimori steel conical nib dip pen. Such a joy to use these materials and tools).
As it happened I used 8 A5 sheets (A4 cut down). Old oddments of paper were cut down for the reverse side.
That was this morning. My intention is to do something more in it before putting on covers. Hmm…
I’m really enjoying the different process approaches that the orihon vehicle can support.
It’s been a while – mundane things needing attention. The path back has been through reading.
It started with two articles in The Guardian. Zan Brooks’s review of The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien intrigued. Shortly after there was a piece by Thien herself – the books of my life. I wanted to read her book. I wanted to read at least some of the books she was reading. The initial selection:
Each in its own way fascinating, if somewhat challenging. And very soon joined by Alice Oswald Memorial: A version of Homer’s Iliad – I chose the edition with an afterword by Eavan Boland. Oswald attempts to translate the atmosphere, not the story.
I recommend them all, and even more in combination. They set me buzzing. One major thread – what is an epic? what could it mean today? what could it mean in my work? A second thread was around translation. Rather than go into detail here, I’ll link to some brief notes shared with my monthly Creative Research class with Ruth Hadlow:
The sustained major effort suggested by “Epic” doesn’t make sense in my own practice of making and thinking. Could it build from fragments? If my practice is process rather than outcome, could it be the journey, the thinking along the way, the accumulation of gestures? An infinite accordion book, like a strip map, a series of steps.
A month of steps.
The thud of iambic pentameter broke me. It worked best when I ignored it.
I visited old obsessions – the layout of a Book of Hours; glyphs developed as part of note-taking; playing with script, especially akim (that post also has a lot on book forms).
The next month the same basic form but slightly different rules/constraints, some different media…
And then the veer, the bend, the fork in the path. The Creative Research group reminded me about Etel Adnan (see for example https://www.poetryfoundation.org/blog/open-door/85586/the-infinite-cartography-of-etel-adnan; https://www.claude-lemand.com/artiste/etel-adnan?souspage=oeuvres&id_rub=17). Adnan worked in pre-made Japanese books. The form is sometimes called “orihon”, Adnan’s works are generally termed “leporello”, or you might say “concertina” or “zig zag” and I’m sure there’s more. Adnan’s books seemed to be different to my simple folds. I bought an Awagami Orihon. Beautiful! The form is different – instead of my single strip, with extensions quickly glued on, this has a series of single folded pages, overlapping and glued in two layers, neatly finished with covers. My imprecise diagram of a very precise form:
The edges of two pages on one side are glued to the outside tip of a hill of the other side, right up to the fold without going over it. The parts away from the hill or valley folds are not glued, so you can later slide little bits between front and back layers. I tested by making one with A4 onion skin paper and covers of watercolour paper.
The text is a quote from Monument by Bonny Cassidy, about the objects in our lives. I sketched from objects left by my mother, slipped tissue paper gelli prints between the layers … lots of personal meaning and connection. Made as a whole and decidedly not epic.
I find it tricky to work from – both instructions and diagrams opaque – but intriguing. My first couple of attempts use a kind of stabilised concertina.
Creative Group Exercise
This month the group shared a number of readings. I cherry-picked from my notes, added from a few other sources, stirred it up into a working brief, and have done an initial test. It’s all about process not outcome, I don’t have a polished presentation, but this may give an idea:
Gleanings
Erin ManningThe Minor Gesture
“experiences lively differential”; “The smell of red: a direct feeling of redness that folds into itself a living memory of a certain quality of air, of a certain angle of light, of a certain sense of place.”
“the activating of a certain minor tendency that resonates across time… a gesture felt in the event both as absolutely singular and infinitely multiplicitous.”
Margaret AtwoodBurning Questions (still in Canada, but August not September)
An annual visit; so many walks. This particular walk, and its surrounding context of events.
“poems are embedded in their time and place. They can’t renounce their roots. But, with luck, they may also transcend them.”
“Slow walking leads to rumination, which leads to poetry.”
String though, we still have string. It links things together. A string of pearls.
…
So hard to describe the smallest details of flowers.
M Leona GodinImage Description and the Critical Blind Gaze
“As with all translations, something will be lost and something gained in the process. Seeing through language takes time. What is lost is the instantaneous look. What is gained is slow seeing.”
“an unfolding of complexity through time and effort.”
“you might choose to begin your description with the thing that pierces you.” Personal; a salient detail.
“paring down language to create something that is expressive, yet concise.”
Poetry School exercises – drawing the particular tree; drawing time; drawing breath
Michael Taussig The Sun Gives without Receiving: A Reinterpretation of the Devil Stories p. 236 in The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America https://selforganizedseminar.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/taussig_devil_commodity.pdf . I was planning to write about gifts (fascinating word), Simryn Gill and the price of giving and receiving when I started reading this (I changed direction after reading the Atwood writing). Taussig’s account of Walter Benjamin’s views provides a contrast. “History itself has taken the turn whereby people are increasingly unable to assimilate the data of the world by way of experience. The capacity to remember is under siege because, in a shell-shocked world, the capacity to experience has had to atrophy.”
Brief
Working slowly, attentively, thoughtfully, associatively
Enter location / experience (physical or otherwise)
What strikes you?
What familiar patterns do you recognise?
What is different?
Make notations – text, mark, explore language. In the moment, yet pushing / seeing deeper for precision and clarity.
Perhaps extend through reflection, developing material (memory, marks), reworking brief…
Experience I took an A2 sheet of drawing paper to a nearby park.
Transcript:
Minor Gestures Mindarie Park Sunday, raining, sitting in a barbeque shelter. Three twists / tweaks / minor gestures that I planned. Except the rain has mostly stopped Just puddles and a sense of moisture in the air. And not the shelter I wanted. I was just about to sit down when a couple asked if I could move. They wanted the power point. It must not have worked because they and their car/truck have gone. Walking back after checking I notice the mushrooms by the tree. Four or five types, I think.
Ibis graze the slope of pasture two galahs join kookaburra sits alert
The toddler’s playground is empty The seniors exercise set unused, lines in space. A couple of dogs have walked their owners by. Someone just sat with her laptop in a shelter. My would-be shelter. There’s some odd exercise going on in the third at the bottom of the slope. And no shouts from the multi-purpose court or the adventure set.
Just one scrap of bunting survives on the shelter’s eaves. Balloon long lost from its string.
Another? The same? kookaburra flew before I could see it clearly. Leaving only an impression of the bars on its tail, the square head and powerful beak. It’s back! and quickly guzzles a worm.
It was a different and refreshing experience. I felt responsive in the moment, despite the level of reading and planning earlier. I’d like to do more along the same lines – although each time different.
I’m still trying to slow and deepen my reading and thinking. It’s hard to maintain the intensity. I make some effort to understand the points a particular author is trying to make, but a higher priority is to find what is of meaning or use to me – even if it’s a distortion or misreading of the text. I want to compare, contrast, extend, re-evaluate in combination with other reading and thinking. Consistency and coherence are not the point.
specific; precision; not wordy; sparse; not generalisation
a husk of thinking, part of a process
!! take further. and then…
Remediate / develop relationship with language
learn to play; build skills
develop, enrich my personal language
list / poetry (daunting → distracting) / writing – another way to tease out thought
I was thinking of it as part of process, but also had a hazy image of outcome – creating a whole with different types of marks.
I tried a list combining elements of creative practice and observations/reading on noisy miners. I don’t know enough about writing, nor about the social structure of noisy miners. The most I can claim is that it’s a start. Barely.
Noisy miners process
Spaces of activity overlap complete cooperate
Meaning in text and line
Slow eyes struggle to discriminate in darting
Seeking patterns of thought
Coteries most stable venture feed nestlings defend
Combine to extend beyond
Garrulous songs scoldings alarms
Disrupt sparse precision
Coalitions still further mob copulate
Colony forage roost expanding
Finally I used the text in a more visual way.
A second example, with writing based on a number of essays.
1. 2 JN: Caught! I as subject. Trapped in my neurotypical cage. Where is some more-than, the +? A quick sketch. A mud-map.
environments +; ecologies + All the fields of relation, of context, surrounding, interacting.
bodies + Not subjects. Potential actors in the widest sense possible?
repetitive movements + Each “repetition” unique events. Major movements?
EM: “event-based improvisation that is part of all our daily choreographies”
2. 3 per MC: Hugh Raffles, a person “who views matter itself as relational, complex, plural, and open.” Rocks are – well, I don’t know, but not objects. Possible something whose + may activate an event with a movement in a relational field?
3. 10 EM: “To feel in the moving, to activate the more-than that coincides both with object likeness and relational fielding, is to experience the non-linearity of time where nothing is yet, but everything acts.”
4. 11 HB per KB: writing a new force. free. to draw on resources such as typographic, thingness of book object, use of space, all things of poets. all “lifted, tapped, reactivated, remobilized”. Activators?
5. 9 KB: lives with books. Not as things-in-themselves, but bringing them into her spheres of activity. She acts on her first impulse. See, acting, on the more-than, the excess, the potential perceived. An act of memory of the future. A folding in time.
6. 8 EM: “What else can artistic practice become when the object is not the goal, but the activator, the conduit toward new modes of existence?”
7. 6 EM: “the gestural force that opens experience to its potential variation” pairs with a memory of the future – “an attunement, in the event, to futurity not as succession but as rhythm: the future pulses in experience in-forming.”
8. 13 EM: “I am proposing … an approach that take the art process as generative of thought, and that transversally that thought-in-the-act to a writing practice, should the need arise for writing to accompany it.” “… thought [reoriented] to the relational field of the occasion …” not delimited “within linguistic limits of intelligibility”.
9. 7 HB per CC: intuiting the more-than of the novel form, and in her writing challenging, complicating, dislocating, “voyaging to her art space, hosting intellectual revolution”?
10. 4 JN: Mum interpreted events by geological time, unconcerned by the rhythms of climate change. Or was it an acceptance? Where can we find +?
11. 15 JN: A green star in the margin of my mind from the beginning. I roll the dice and renumber.
12. 12 HB per KB: “Sentences mislead us because language imposes on us more logic than there often is in life, and because what is the most precious in ourselves is what remains unformulated.”
13. 14 EM: “A process must determine its own reason. Any attempt to chart in advance the interplay between the anarchic fullness of experience welling and the cut of actualization into determinateness of an event’s coming-to-be, stems the potential for difference.”
14. 1 JN: I nod to Hélène Bessette, Le Résumé 1 in numbered paragraphs. After consideration, let’s say numbered in order begun, ignoring later edits. Then disrupt in that memory of the future. Avoid the assumption of linear, historical time (will you see the side-eye at Flusser, my repetitive knee-jerk to the voice of authority? Which suggests a major gesture of habit. What minor gesture can I introduce?)
15. 5 Kate Briggs in a scaffold of time. Five years, two years, anytime, over time, continuing, extended, sustained, that can’t last. Folded.
I’m currently doing an online class with the Poetry School (https://poetryschool.com/) – Drawing Language: Experimental Scores, Drawings, & Asemic Writing Masterclass , tutored by Sophie Seita. I immediately want to add disclaimers after a sentence like that. It’s clearly a massive stretch. All the more space to learn.
The first assignment gave a range of “scores” and asked us to enact one and document the process. I chose Bruno Munari’s drawing a tree, and decided to draw a particular tree in as many ways as I could by the deadline.
12 variations drawing the blackbutt
Having lived half my life under this tree, I have never seen it as a whole.
12. Canopy – digital wind vortex Photograph, edited (gimp)
Assignment 2 asked us to notate and accompany a piece of music / sound work. One of the reference materials was a lecture by JJJJJerome Elias https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUyJLSKj-wg
I submitted this:
Notating and accompanying music of the Tree
I acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the Land on which I dwell, the Gai-mariagal clans of the Northern Sydney Region. I pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.
Process
With refreshed and enriched appreciation of the Tree I wanted to spend more time with it. Following from the work of variation 11 in assignment 1, I chose to spend time each day listening to the tree while holding thoughts from various readings and material. Notations were made as part of each experience / performance.
Wind breath. Coloured pencil Mark made, or not, on exhalation [inspired by an image supplied by Sophie of Christine Sun Kim’s work the sound of non-sounds]
Lounging on the deck at last light, looking up through the canopy, I became aware of the complex rhythms, the oscillations within constraints of branches and leaves.
(also the contrast of timbers, pergola and Tree – domestic setting, but a wild tree.)
It reminded me of the combinations of movement in a mobile.
A quick sketch of concept used wrapped yarns as leaves on an existing mobile.
It could be interesting to develop as a stabile (table based, extending upwards), and different leaf materials
In the class discussion later I gave some background: most of my reflection in the early part of the week related to Jerome Ellis. His words about violence, domination and power reflecting the ongoing experiences of Aboriginal people following the British invasion of this land. “Dwell” came from https://www.nationalsawdust.org/articles/carve-out-a-little-emptinessor-jjjjjerome-ellis-enters danilo machado wrote: “Ellis describes his process of ‘carv[ing] out a little emptiness’ leading up to performances—in other words, creating a clearing—wanting to ‘arrive at the music knowing as little as possible about it.’ … “The album is a deliberate non-verbal no-liner-notes follow-up to The Clearing’s hypertextuality. I think of André 3000’s recent instrumental release New Blue Sun. The record is almost 90 minutes of ‘no bars,’ and marked the Outkast musician’s first record in seventeen years following an acclaimed career of dense verses. JJJJJerome shares how instrumental music has always been a significant space for grieving and dwelling. He tells me about how he’s always been drawn to music that deploys certain organizational techniques (like loops, drones, vibrato) that facilitate—and teach—dwelling. This dwell, this slow, is in many ways a protest to capitalist, ableist urgency.” and in https://bakonline.org/en/research+publications/prospections/the+clearing+music+dysfluency+blackness+and+time/ Ellis wrote “If fluent speech (and by extension fluent time) is a path through a forest, when I stutter I come into a clearing where the path temporarily disappears. The clearing opens the present moment. But when my interlocutor interrupts me while I’m stuttering, this expanded present is foreclosed.” Dwelling, grieving, slow, the clearing, an expanded present. All mixed with simply spending time there.
“The act of reading allows the conjunction of the world of the book with the present tense of the reader.” Marian Macken Binding Space: The Book as Spatial Practice.
Just earlier in her discussion of the book as exhibition of architecture, Macken quoted André Tavares – in part, “Such a physical proximity permits strategic insights across time that dissolve chronology…” Macken goes on to reference Intercalations: paginated exhibition series in which Anna-Sophie Springer considers the library as curatorial space.
Following up that reference leads to amazing riches at K. Verlag publishers, including a free downloadable pdf of the series. Holding tightly to my thread in this labyrinth, Springer references a short film by Alain Resnais and comments “the narrator’s voiceover highlights the crucial shift of value that occurs as soon as a specific book has been selected and requested from storage by an individual user”.
Springer goes on to use Bergsonian concepts “… this emphasis on selection and constellation, however idiosyncratic, is at the heart of curatorial thought and practice as one method of making meaning, however esoteric.”
So we have: book; time; curation; collection; exhibition; selection; library; archive; making meaning. A kind of flattening, dissolving, of hierarchies and orders including of author (creator) and reader (viewer), of past, present and future. Fascinated, excited, lost – no wonder I read so slowly (two months on Macken’s not-at-all hefty volume). Neither academic nor architect, my interest at the moment is thinking about what artists’ books are, and how I can make books as part of an ongoing creative process. “Making a book” seems an end-product focused project. I wanted to think about the implications of all this, but my mind keeps flitting about. Heavy mental lifting!
A few weeks later, some doodles turned into this:
A page of sketch and text, of materials play. Deciphering it now, I was thinking about the Present – the glass on my table. That selecting and sketching it somehow changed time. I folded the page into a little book.
and thought
a series of experiences bound together zines of moments, thoughts as is coming together in relation to
(the as is coming from Ann Lauterbach, Toward a Poetics of the Whole Fragment, which gives rise to another set of speculations about objects and time).
The next day another, more deliberate, doodle. Thinking about the folding of time and paper…
… and started playing with ideas around zine forms, each part of a thought session, bound in a book.
It has become a little process – in the following example the trigger was from Johanna Drucker, who in a footnote explains that in writing of “prosaic rather than poetic”, “I am not making a distinction between prose and poetry, but between ordinary and imaginative use of language.” I’ve often been puzzled by “poetic”, so collected some definitions. Next was thinking about my aspirations for poetic and poetic-adjacent. Beautiful, graceful and elegant don’t resonate. I swapped in quirky, ungainly, and more.
I was ready to do my thoughtful doodle on the other side of the page.
A simple stitched binding of the zines into a book would mean restricting any view of the full page, plus losing the buildup / driver text on the back. Instead I’ve been folding Crown Book blizzard forms (from The Art of the Fold by Hedi Kyle and Ulla Warchol). They’re sized to form a small backbone, the zines folded from A4 sliding in).
Almost all the pages have text in ink or coloured pencil, and areas of colour from Gelato crayons (rubbed on using baking paper). For ease of folding I’m avoiding any buildup of thickness or stiffness of the paper, leading to a few experiments.
The next page also started with reading Drucker – this time on Steve McCaffery and the ink materiality of the letter. Further searching on McCaffrey led to an article by Marjorie Perloff and the page as “a kind of trellis, upon which words and letters are fastened visually as well as semantically”.
The black element, my version of a trellis, is laser printed – a photo, manipulated in gimp, of some basketry I did back in 2016.
Stamping with found objects provided a different means of mark-making on this page.
On the back is a follow-on of the “poetic” page – a long list of traits I’d like in my work. The page began with loose marks based on the huge gumtree in our back yard, and again reflects my interest in The Moment.
I now have a tiny collection, or library, of books of zines of pages of thinking.
Circling back, in my present now – here typing – these past thoughts, forming and formed by the process of making, are present anew, new arrangements in a new proximity, part of this moment of new thinking. Plus even now I look forward to future moments with them.
Even better, I have a new process which supports, frames, focuses, slows, thinking – and happens to leave its traces in books.
Strips were cut from the pages Cartographia: Mapping Civilizations by Vincent Virga and The Library of Congress. It’s a beautiful book I associate with my mother, so wouldn’t have been able to cut into it except I have two copies. One I brought home when clearing mum’s apartment, only to find another already on my shelves – probably a gift from her.
A hex weave basket: inner layer 300 gsm watercolour paper for a strong structure; outer layer map book strips. Big enough to hold an A5 book flat, it’s now storing various small book experiments.
Books that can grow #1 – Tab hinge
Traci and I have been swapping small art book pages monthly. No end in sight, so we needed a book form that can grow as needed. Traci introduced me to this cloth hinge structure:
Each page is joined to the previous with 2 (or 3) tabs, and to the next with 3 (or 2) tabs. Delay putting on a back cover; leave tabs hanging on the final page; hinge in additional pages as required.
My ongoing book has some hex weave decorating the front.
Each spread has Traci’s original work opposite a photo of what I sent that month. The card of the page is A4 folded to A5, so the tabs are enclosed and don’t show except at the spine.
Books that grow #2 – repeated pamphlet
Pretty straightforward. I filled one of the initial books created for the project, so just stitched another signature next to the first. At some point I can extend the cover. No hurry.
Books that grow #3 – slip knot binding
I first saw this structure demonstrated by Lisbeth Degn. I’ve used it to collect index cards that outlined a past project, and in building/extending an envelope book for collage scrap storage.
For me the most exciting use, the one with most potential, was built as an integral part of thinking.
Musing about aspects of bookness, I did a brain dump onto leftover book-strips from the hex weave. The strips were sorted into groups, combined with other bits and printouts, and glued onto pages (from a cardboard box ).
The pages developed over a few sessions, with extra notes and mark-making as I extended my thinking.
Bound together using the slip knot binding
with additions always possible.
None of this was apparent or planned at the beginning. The real heat of creation has gone, but I still add to it, refer to it, at times.
Books that grow #4 – stub binding
The process is convoluted. I keep a paper-based notebook. It includes material from reading (quotes, my reactions…); ideas and sketches for making; brain dumps; doodles; to-do and done lists. The immediacy, the tactility, of working on paper by hand is important. Often I’m watching the words as they appear, still thinking, not yet knowing the end of the sentence.
But I like using an electronic document. I can add tags, links, photos. I can search, copy & paste. So I type up my paper notebook, scan images as needed, on a private wordpress blog.
For bookness I want to experience working in books in as many ways as I can come up with – including working with my notes. So I’ve trawled through the private blog (so far just this year’s entries, but I plan to go back further), collating all the book-related material in Scrivener, planning to print it out in a book. A book with a lot of pages, and anticipating more pages – both earlier and future.
It stalled while I wondered how I could work with the pages, keeping them ordered and fairly neat, in the process of becoming a book.
Current morning reading is the very wonderful Binding Space: The Book as Spatial Practice by Marian Macken. At one point she gives a list of “some different structural options:”
My collated notes from January to mid-October came to 120 pages, including generous margins. I printed them into A5 booklets of 5 A4 sheets printed front and back – so 20 pages per booklet. Each booklet is pamphlet-stitched into what is / will be a stub. There is plenty of space for marginalia. No page numbers needed as the entries remain in chronological order. It’s even a bit easier to work with multiple entries if they happen to be in separate booklets. At some future time I can bind the booklets – and future booklets – together.
An unexpected twist – I found myself wanting to work by theme, rather than chronologically. I search on relevant words in Scrivener – its search function is better than wordpress, and it doesn’t include non-book-related material. I note down the relevant dates and go back to work in the printed version. The kicker is – I “note down” on literal index cards! I am building the future book’s index as I work in the actual pages of the to-be-book.
Non-thinking books #1
Sometimes working in a book is just that. Over-thinking not required.
This book is a sketchbook. It’s A4, using folded A3 sheets -almost all pre-marked from various workshops and experiments over the years.
I just go in and do stuff. Go back and do some more stuff. I managed most days for a couple of weeks and got into a good “just respond, don’t think” flow.
The material in it may remain in this book, or be cut/torn out to become part of something else.
Non-thinking books #2
This is an existing book (it happens to be on the history of economic theory) – in which I’m mark-making.
It becomes a very quiet activity. There’s some thinking, but not necessarily about what I’m doing. And the current physical book object is anticipated to be a non-book in the future, as the pages become collage fodder.
Finally, further back in this post I mentioned a cardboard box. Before it became a book it held a small laser printer (black only). This was inspired by a Lemon Creation video, which shows making collage tissue paper using a laser printer. So you can scan your mark-making and print it. Perhaps resized. Perhaps edited. Perhaps based on a photo or other source rather than your marks.
So one of the pages in my collage-experimentation accordion book got a new layer based on an edited photo of some fabric I indigo-dyed years back.
A new spread in my bookness watercolour sketchbook centres on elements from a photo of tawney frogmouths who were sitting outside my workroom. (It’s almost the time of year they come. I’m hopeful.)
I love this feeling of folding time, bringing forward what is past. Deepening and enriching my work.
Why books? What are “artists’ books”? When, where and how?
In the past I’ve made books as containers. Having completed 100 watercolour swatches it felt natural to make a book to store them, protect them, make them available for reference (30-Jun-2024).
I’ve made books intended as tools, as a way to capture ideas and progress in a project. That same post shows a concertina book I made to support a creative remembrance of my dad.
It didn’t work out that way. Transcribing the stash of old letters (into Scrivener) became its own experience, complete with responding via “postcards”. Typing up the final letter felt a new loss – of dad, mum, childhood… The project concertina was untouched after the first flurry. I need space before I can return to this.
I’ve made blank books in classes, to learn techniques and structures, to produce sites of potential. Of particular note were classes with Adele Outteridge (blogged 25-July-2014) and Avril Makula (through the NSW Guild of Bookbinders last year – not blogged, so a couple of the books made shown here).
The black-paged one on the left was part of the inspiration for the postcard process – it feels a modern reworking of old albums.
For much of this year I’ve been in a monthly swap of “book pages” with a friend in the USA, although actual books are still works in progress for both of us. In another creative group it seems pretty much everyone has “book” in their plans. Book tutorials appear throughout my YouTube subscriptions. But what and why exactly is attracting me now? And a fundamental problem – if I claim my creative practice is about process, how can I start with an end product “book” in mind?
Bookness, rather than a book, as an exploration.
Bookness as a way of working
not as vessel for work made elsewhere / elsewhen
Explore my relationship to book, how it feels to work in book, what book means to me.
Book as cicada husk of experience flown.
It’s developed in what I now think of as a manifold process. A diverse, varied, abundant, plural, complicated set of processes – thinking, making, reading, remembering, exploring, experimenting Book. And, pleasingly, literally folding. Getting to detail level, I want to use as many materials and processes from my past experience as possible.
Some initial questions:
Foundational: What is a book? Why art as a book?
Properties (not all, or perhaps any, required)
Physicality (a choice). Pages?
Mobile
Autonomous
A bounded field(?)
Scale
Completeness
Function
Form
Technology – tools, materials, skills, roles, processes in making and using book
Why book? Purpose
Vessel/container (inert? One of alternatives?)
Literary? Visual? A form in itself?
Cultural and personal meaning
Connection (to self; to other)
Conventions
Symbolism
A lot of words there, and I’m not convinced of meaning – but a place to start thinking. As my thinking is often grounded by and performed through making, here is some evidence of the process.
Book as containers. Pamphlet stitched. Two have watercolour pages and covers from experiments with new-to-me coloured pencils, plus inks. One has a cover of words and glyphs related to books and book-making – pretty much a brain dump. I’ve been using it as daily log, plus lists: possible explorations; types of book; details of work in watercolour books…
Book thinking as image, using text as language and texture Spreads so far in the watercolour books, often using Akim script as well as my standard handwriting.
Script blocks. Seen in the final spread above, Akim script used in word blocks. While part of my mind is focused on designed and executing the blocks, another part is free-flowing with related ideas.
I’m finding 50 gsm bank layout paper combined with sumi ink pleasing aesthetically and as a physical process (the feel while working). The example above was then folded into a dos à dos book (from Hedi Kyle and Ulla Warchol The Art of the Fold).
I start most mornings reading The Century of Artists’ Books by Johanna Drucker. Sometimes it’s less than a page, as I get caught up by an idea, or possibly stuck – intrigued but not understanding. One day, finding it hard to focus, I anchored my thinking by developing character blocks of words from Drucker’s text.
Later I came back and concentrated on each word.
That’s been folded and may at some time be bound as a signature of a book. Or not.
A major find from Drucker was artist Barbara Fahrner. Drucker wrote: “Fahrner is an artist for whom making books is a fundamental way of processing her experience into symbolic form – to give it meaning and to give it a permanence which counteracts the transient inconsequentiality of the passage of time.”
I printed off quite a bit, and bound using a 4 hole binding (from Japanese Book-Binding: Instructions from a Master Craftsman by Kojiro Ikegami). A wonderful reference for myself.
The text from Drucker became part of another watercolour spread.
Text becomes decoration becomes book.
The “technology of bookness” spread shown near the top was merged using gimp with a photo of one of my colour swatch pages. That was printed out, then folded into a tiny book form following a “paper bag art journal” tutorial by Margarete Miller.
There is more making in progress. Plus while I’ve evidenced the time and physicality of the project above, the actual thoughts, the tentative conclusions, the new questions, the altered understanding – all of that remains within me.
Fibres of Being 