The first bridge

I've been stumbling over how to get started with the artist's book project, partly because I've been stuck in a gloomy hole about completely separate family things. Only they're not completely separate because when I get like that, sunk in on myself and gloomy, I can't work. It affects everything I do, my (tiny flicker of) faith in myself... etc, etc.

Having snapped out of it, and waking up with ideas half-formed I've had a great time working out the practicality of the first bridge book. I got a bit stuck on identifying a first bridge, until I realised that it didn't have to be a real bridge, it could be a conceptual bridge or a fantasy bridge, or in fact any damned bridge I like!

Then I stumbled upon a poem by Walt Whitman, which tied a few things together for me. I wrote a poem on the plane coming over here in 2006, about all sorts of stuff including loneliness and spiders and hoping you've done the right thing, and the Whitman poem coincided beautifully with what I was saying and with the theme of bridges, and gave me a sort of entry-point into the first book.

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul

Another book idea

I thought I'd put this in just for fun, although it's something I did about 5 years ago. I like origami and this is a large version of Tomoko Fuse's rotating tetrahedron which is made out of three rectangles of paper. It rotates, folding and unfolding the images as it goes, and that for me makes it a book. This example is a poignant one for me as the images are of the area around where we scattered my mother's ashes in Petworth Park in West Sussex, England, and the pictures were taken just afterwards. I was - am - distraught about it; it was such a sad and strange occasion, but set in a beautiful landscape on Midsummers' Day, what would have been her 65th birthday. Richard Long had done an installation in the park, of glinting white pebbles that made a path in the moonlight, but I didn't stay to see the moon come up.
















The rotating tetrahedron acts like a sort of prayer bead: turning it over and over again I see the beauty of the place with its white pebble paths, elegant trees and the wonderful landscape of the South Downs, which was part of my childhood, and I feel comforted.
















I keep thinking of doing another book like this.

Hoorah for the Paperboys

Yep, I've just come off the phone from placing my order with the lovely Craig Tillotson who is, I gather, one of the company's founders, from looking at their website. Nice man, and a big thank you to him for sorting out an order of a pile of A3 size greyboard which is 1.5mm thick. Hoorah! It should all arrive next week, which means I won't have any excuse for stalling on those slip-cases, which will be good a) because it means I will have started the project properly and b) because it will force me to think more about the contents.

Suppliers

Aargh! It does get hard to find suppliers over here! In the UK it wasn't a big stretch to get things from another country, if need be - postage costs weren't high because the relative distances are small. Here it's as far to get paper from Melbourne as it is to get paper from, I don't know, Germany, but the postage costs are huge because the transport network isn't as developed and I guess demand isn't as high.

A big challenge is actually finding suppliers, and the temptation when you can't find what you want is to look for it in Europe and think about getting it shipped over, but then you are stung for the postage costs! I've been trying hard to find greyboard. You know, that grey cardboard, about 1.5mm thick and I guess around 900gsm that is used to make book covers. Well I've found suppliers who can let me have industrial quantities of the stuff for $1,000 or so... but I haven't found anyone yet who can sell me 20 or so sheets at a reasonable price. It's possible that The Paperboys might be able to help, and I am awaiting a reply to my latest question, so I'll let you know how I get on. Meanwhile I managed to find some greyboard at J Hewit & Sons in Edinburgh and thought that I'd get a quote, out of interest, from their on-line shop. The quote for cardboard was fine: GBP 9, but the quote for postage was ridiculous: over GBP53! For a few pieces of cardboard! Since the postage rate didn't change if I amended the order quantity I assume it was a flat rate charge that would cover up to a certain weight of posted goods, but even so it is pretty steep... I won't be buying from them, anyway, which is a shame as they had lots of things I'd find really useful.

Oh well. Hopefully The Paperboys will come good for me. If not I'll be scavanging cardboard from the back covers of a lot of sketch pads in order to make my slip cases!

Format

I've got this grand conception rolling around in my head at the moment, gathering detritus as it wanders through and getting more and more complicated... the trouble is that the germ of the idea seems like a good one: using slip cases for each monthly instalment, but formating them like childrens' building blocks - brightly coloured, simple shapes (but not just variations on the standard book rectangle), and able to be reconfigured into a bridge, just as Grub's building blocks can make bridges. Fantastic idea! But...













Size? Colour? Contents? Closures...? Lots of issues to sort out. Grub's blocks are no longer than 3 inches, but mostly 1 - 2 inches across. I can't make complex shapes that small for slip-cases, and enlarging the shapes seems to add to the idea of them. But how big? Some of Grub's most intruiging blocks - the ones that started me off down this path in the first place - are rectangles with an arch scooped out of the bottom edge. They're yellow and they look like bridges! We love playing with the blocks: we make castles, fairy palaces, bridges, tower blocks, all sorts of things; I think the idea that the slip cases could be configured separately from their contents is great. The challenge is creating something manageable, that I can get to grips with using the limited resources at my disposal...

So what about contents? Well, as I envision nice, precise building-block-shapes for my slip covers, clad in primary colours, I also envision nice, precise innards, so I was thinking about 12 bridges - one for each month - with two sorts of innards to go inside the cases. One would be a pop-up bridge: a direct physical representation of the real bridge, probably with cut edges to the fold-out insert, and clean text and graphics. The other would be a more personal response, as several bridges are part of my 'history': the Clifton Suspension Bridge, for example, or Waterloo Bridge. They feature in different parts of my life and in a strange way they represent different things. These inclusions might be less precise, deckle-edged and not as 'clean', in a graphic sense.

This leads me on to a provisional list of Which Bridges? I came up with nine off the top of my head: the Clifton Suspension Bridge, Sydney Harbour Bridge, bridges in Venice, Magdalen Bridge in Oxford, bridges across the Seine in Paris, the bridge over the Bospherous in Istanbul, Waterloo Bridge, Coffs Harbour rail bridge, the Stari Most bridge across the river Neretvar in Mostar, Bosnia. That leaves three still to occur to me.

Size-wise, looking at Grub's blocks, I think I'd have to do them at least 400% of their actual size, to make them easy to handle. The shapes are going to cause me enough problems, without complicating things further! I'm going to have to make a run to Spotlight, a local store that's a bit of an Aladdin's cave of wonders for crafts-people in order to get enough card to make 12 slip cases anyway, having used up the last of my UK supplies making slipcases for the two souvenir books I made for my father-in-law and his twin brother, celebrating their seventieth birthday party in Wagga last November.

Happy New Year

January 1st, 2008; the start of a new year and a new project for me. I found myself a bit isolated towards the end of last year, because most of my friends and art colleagues are a long way away from here. This project - the monthly creation of an artists' book related to the theme of 'bridges' and 'distance' - is my way of reaching out, as well as a way of self-imposing some badly needed discipline on my practice!

There is a possibility that the project will be a reciprocal one with an artist in the UK, or it might be a solo project. A reciprocal project would be much more interesting for me, but might not work out... whatever happens, this blog is a 'bucket' in which to put a record of the creative process of making the books and the thinking process behind them.