Tag: artist books

Thank You!

Thank You!

I am delighted to share with you a sneaky peak at the wonderful selection of Artist’s Books that have been gifted to us since the fair in October. As we were funded by the arts council for the event and so were able to offer 

Exhibition up at Kollider

Exhibition up at Kollider

We were asked by Kollider to install an exhibition of some of the books from our collection. They were a little bit blown away by the sheer volumn and quality of what was on show during the fair (as were we all!). So last week 

Sarah Grace Dye

Sarah Grace Dye

How did you become involved with artist’s books?

Years ago when I was teaching at the Arts University Bournemouth we taught a unit about artist’s books. During the unit the students learnt how to make paper and had sessions to introduce them to a number of book binding techniques. I think I learnt as much as they did and I was hooked. I stayed behind after their sessions and made lots of paper trapping bits of my drawings in the layers of paper and my first book just kind of happened.

In recent years, Artist’s Books have become integral to my practice because they are portable and can be made anywhere with anything. I travel a lot so need a portable practice but more importantly having moved and down-sized twice in the past year I am aware that whatever I make needs storing in small spaces.

What is the focus of your practice?

I think this is very much still evolving! I am someone who loves a process and playing and it is only later on that I understand why I’ve made what I have. I enjoy materials, especially paper, so I am always collecting particularly papers that others have discarded.  

I collect stories real or imagined, I love finding objects and imagining where they came from and who owned them before me. But, also making a book is about trapping a moment in time, memories and thoughts and keeping them safe and away from harm. Drawing, cyanotype and collage work really well in this process.

Over the last few years, I have lost each of my immediate family members to cancer and with that inherited so many objects that have stories and memories attached. I am now the sole keeper of many memories which sometimes weighs heavily giving a great sense of responsibility. I think this has fed into my practice and challenged me to reimagine ways of collecting and recording memories, people and ‘stuff’.

What are you working on at the moment?

I have a series of matchbooks to finish from a trip around South India earlier this year. I collected all sorts of ephemera as I travelled around and a diverse range of matchboxes. I have made thirteen matchbooks so far and have about three left to do. I am also in the middle of a project that is a compilation of holiday scrapbooks from my childhood summers in North Wales, reimagined into a deconstructed old Welsh story book that I picked up in a charity shop in Porthmadog on a recent trip. Finally, I am just beginning to put together work for a publication of recipes, drawings and stories from my travels that will focus on gluten free food.

Instagram @sarah_grace_dye  &  @thenomadicnortherner

www.sarahgracedye.com

www.thenomadicnortherner.com

Holly Serjeant

Holly Serjeant

How did you become involved in artists’ books? I did my degree in Bookbinding and Calligraphy which gave me a good grounding in techniques employed to create a range of different bindings. I’ve exhibited my work at Manchester and Liverpool Artists Book Fairs where a 

Girasol Press

Girasol Press

How did you become involved in artist’s books? Haphazardly, really. We – that’s Leire Barrera Medrano and Dan Eltringham – did a letterpress workshop in London with the marvellous Pixel Press, and caught the slow-speed bug there. We bought our letterpress, trays of type, rollers, 

Kiss and Tell Press/Michael Wynne

Kiss and Tell Press/Michael Wynne

How did you become involved in artist’s books?

I’d been a writer for about twenty years when I began to feel I wanted more than words. Photography is an old love of mine that I’d kind of forgotten for thirty years. I started taking pictures of friends, lovers and strangers, and began to make photobooks. In the beginning my practice was so private that I just did whatever I wanted – with a bit of help from YouTube videos! Then I allowed myself to do bad illustrations and made zines out of them. I guess, in a way, it all happened organically – this search for other ways to engage with the book form – but was also unexpected. Writing was always how I identified what I do, then gradually I was an artist. Then, about five years ago, a weekend bookbinding workshop at City Lit in London changed everything and opened up new possibilities for me. What I realised as soon as I started studying bookbinding, is that my love for books is just as much for books as objects than it is for what happens inside them. 

What is the focus of your practice?

My main focus is trying to make sense of the world. Relationships, sex, Brexit, trauma, PTSD, life in a war zone, how we survive and keep going. I’m very interested in what happens when two people are in a room alone together, and I’m interesting in exploring ways to make sense through mark-making on paper, through abstraction. After a lifetime of relying solely on words – writing is the hardest artform – I like the playfulness and experimentation that visual art allows. 

What are you working on at the moment?

I’ve just finished a big artist’s book called Brexit. That was exhausting and abstract, so I’m back to words and trying to finish a couple of novels I’ve been working on for a while. I’m also working on a photobook about sweets and chocolates.

instagram @michael_wynne_

kissandtellpress.com/

Bethan Maddocks & Remi Bec

Bethan Maddocks & Remi Bec

How did you become involved in artist’s books? It’s all thanks to who we grew up with! Both of us individually have always been drawn to paper and how you can shape and manipulate it, and books are a very direct way of exploring and displaying that 

Sue Lancaster

Sue Lancaster

How did you become involved with artist’s books? I became involved in artist’s books as a response to developing a project to teach creativity to my adult students. The design of covers developed as a way of using interesting textile surfaces for a functional product 

Rachel Smith/Art Smith

Rachel Smith/Art Smith

How did you become involved in artist’s books?As an artist I started making books during my time on the Sheffield Hallam Fine Art MA course, and this interest has continued through my current PhD research.

What is the focus of your practice?

I am interested in both the conceptual system and material object of the book, and how these might be used to explore how sense is sought in language. I use drawing, photography, and writing to materialise error, distraction, and association as part of my disruptive devotion to reading. Fragmentary techniques are employed to reject immediate coherence, opening spaces to reflect on minor processes of meaning-making.

What are you working on currently?

Currently I am working on a set of three books for the practice submission of my PhD. Their status is ambiguous as to whether they are art works, remain as practice research artefacts, or function between these possibilities. Each book object accompanies a particular chapter of my thesis but has also existed in a previous form, definitively as an art work, exhibited or shown as such, but additional material has now been added, the original reformulated, as part of the on-going process of cutting together-apart. One of my interests is how art practice might offer ways of visualising and materialising the thinking or sense-making process in relation to the transmission of physical language. I am using art practice to draw attention to thinking, materialise acts around the construction of sense, as well as celebrating interruption and error as tools for breaking a seemingly never ending flow of information.

social media: twitter @rachelartsmith

Christine Nicholls Inkpot and Pen

Christine Nicholls Inkpot and Pen

How did you become involved in artist’s books? I first came across artist’s books at the exhibition Certain Trees: The Constructed Book, Poem and Object 1964-2008, tucked away in a room at the top of the V&A Museum in 2008. Locked away in a case was