news

Thanks book-makers

Thank you to all the kids who took part in Instant Books! on the 16th April, and all the parents who stopped to give me such nice feedback. It was a blast to teach a completely different set of people, and, it has to be admitted, that I ended up developing some teaching materials that will probably come in very handy the next time I teach some adults!

With that in mind, I'll be tidying up and developing a new handout kit in the resources section for an accordion-fold book with some content, in the form of a set of 'continuous landscape' tip-ins that you can glue in. The idea being that each picture is continuous with any other one in the set. The fun of putting it into an open concertina is that you can continue to match up the 'pages' in new orders after the book is bound - hopefully some food for thought there for more advanced narrative uses too.

It's going to be a busy few weeks with exams and presentations for my Library MSc, but I will find time to put the new kit up in the next week or two.

Thanks again for your support.

Andrew.

Bookbinding for (grown up) beginners

LIMITED PLACES- Book Soon!

An afternoon workshop for adults teaching a simple clothbound hardback book technique with the Society of Designer Bookbinders’ Kate Holland. 

 Learn how to make a hardwearing and attractive book in the Central Library. Places are free but a voluntary donation towards the cost of materials would be welcomed. 

Booking is essential.

Please contact andrew.eason@bristol.gov.uk , 0117 903 7202 to book your place.

 

We Make Books

We Make Books is an artists' book fair that will be taking place at Bristol Central Library on Saturday 12th March. I'm looking forward to seeing a group of artists come and transform the café space into a marketspace for the day.

Instant Books (new date)

A new date for Instant Books: Saturday 16th April. 2.30pm-4pm. (I'm teaching a simple class in bookbinding for kids. Just a few quick, fun, simple little bindings. I do hope that some people can make it.)

Instant Books!

I'm teaching a simple class in bookbinding for kids. Just a few quick, fun, simple little bindings. I do hope that some people can make it. I realise that Thursday afternoon isn't the ideal time for everyone. I didn't specifically plan it to come out that way! Anyway the people at the children's library have been super good about publicising it, so fingers crossed.

Pilgrims

I've begun work on a new series of books, currently 'code named' Pilgrims. It's a series of books about expanding views of the world and/or consciousness, following explorers both of the world and of the mind as they come to terms with new territories both internal and external.

This is a series of stories set in the worlds of introspection, of meditation, and equally in those outward pilgrimages towards some sacred spot, some as-yet-unreached goal, some as-yet-misunderstood reality. It will bring together ideas that have been in my sketchbooks and on my mind for some five years.

PhD Viva Success!

I recently took my viva voce examination in defence of my thesis Becoming What the Book Makes Possible: Aspects of Metaphorisation of Identty and Practice in Artists' Books. My examiners, Mike Nicholson of Ensixteen Editions, and Richard Anderton, offered an insightful and useful critique of the thesis and suggested some additions to the text as it was. I'd like to thank them for their attentive reading of my work and for making the viva a real chance for me to talk to people about my research rather than just a hoop to jump through.

I'd also like to thank my supervisors Iain Biggs and Sarah Bodman, without whose guidance, tolerance and tenacity I'd never have completed.

And, of course, I must thank the many artists whose workplaces I visited, whose conversation, argument and jokes I enjoyed, and whose hospitality and intelligent engagement with what must have seemed a fairly abstruse take on artists' books, made the research at so many points a real pleasure.

I look forward to editing the thesis for a less academic audience and seeking publication. A chapter will be featured in the forthcoming volume of The Blue Notebook, on the subject of 'Making-Reading'.

Pagemakers, 14th-15th Nov, Brewery Arts, Cirencester

Pagemakers will be a weekend book art fair with talks and workshops at Brewery Arts, Cirencester. The weekend will be the 14th-15th November, and I'll be starting to invite participants shortly. Although I would prefer to have a more general call for entrants, the limited amount of space at our disposal means that it's impractical to do so. I'll be posting more information about this project as it unfolds, including, I think, a more general call for proposals for the talks. You'll be able to view collected posts on the topic here.

Amongst other things, I'd like to try to produce a catalogue for the show. It wasn't very difficult to produce one for Small Smaller Smallest using Blurb, and I think that the results were pretty good. I'm going to see if it's feasible to do the same for Pagemakers.

Technorati Tags: exhibition, art, book, cirencester, studiolog

pagemakers

Sometime in November the Brewery Arts Centre in Cirencester will be holding a bookfair and workshop event that we're currently calling 'pagemakers'. Fiona Haser has asked me to curate this event and bring together a group of book artists and workshop leaders to make for an exciting weekend.

We're in the early planning stages at the moment. There will be room for about 20 stalls at the event, and I'm hoping to book about 6 workshops in. Right now I'm still thinking that it would be good to have the stalls filled at least in part though open subscription: open fairs are, I think , important to artists' books. At the same time, I'm conscious of the limited space and the risk one takes with open subscription.

I think a mixed bag of curation and open subscription seems a reasonable compromise. I'll try to get a few cardinal practitioners involved and base it around them.

I'm also wondering if I can work in a slightly more theoretical/discussion aspect.

Small, Smaller, Smallest

I'm curating this small show of artists' books, multiples, livres d'artiste and assorted fine/private press books at Bristol Reference Library 2nd-4th April. There will also be a Renga poetry event on the Thursday night with Alan Summers. The decision to take the somewhat unusual step to show the books in order of size is meant as a humorous gesture towards the way that people often ask for books by size, but is also meant as a bit of an ironic approach to the problem of cataloguing all these different sorts of books. It's tempting to separate the artists' books proper (the bulk of the show) from the rest; but this isn't the point. The idea here is to show the relationships between a carefully produced livres d'artiste and artists' books. Yes, they are different; but there should be a dialogue between different-but-related areas of practice. So here I'm trying to take up Clive Phillpot's notion that 'those books shouldn't be artists's books...they're books.' To which I would add, if the reader is so inclined and the wind blows fair, 'those books aren't artist's books, they're art.' As I've said in the past, I think the readers are smart enough to battle their way through what the book is and isn't without the label to help them. If the book fails despite the lack of a label, it fails anyway, I'd guess.

Small, Smaller, Smallest
Bristol Reference Library
April 2nd-4th
0117 9037202
refandinfo@bristol.gov.uk