I'm often revisiting old prints and cutting them up, to remake the prints into artist books etc. I find many forgotten treasures in my stash, each an opportunity to breathe new life into prints that sadly have been rejected as they're just not good enough for framing.
Last month, I was lucky enough to spend some time gallery sitting in Sydney. I needed to take something to work on, but I didn't want to take my kit for printing. I was thinking 'don't take too much stuff'....well, I still took too much stuff but I did achieve a goal of reworking prints into an artist book.
The prints were part of a series of monoprints that I did a couple of years ago for a hospital commission. There was nothing wrong with the unused prints, they just weren't the best ones.
I had seen an artist book on Pinterest and had been contemplating it for a while. I couldn't quite figure it out so I called on a fellow book artist to help me and she whipped up a sample pretty quickly (to my embarrassment!). Anyway..... that gave me the final motivation to make a book using the format.
Its a concertina book, displayed like a carousel book. It has a folded cutout in the valley folds, revealing an 'inner circle'. My prints were one-sided so I coloured the part that would show on the inside through the popout with loose gelatine prints, thus countering the hardness of the white paper and giving the viewer something interesting to look at as they peer through the cutouts.
After attaching covers and a tie using found string, the book is fully resolved. I'm pretty pleased with it. I'll probably use it as a sample to create another one using a different set of prints, next time I want the imagery of the prints to link to the format of the book.
Tick, cross that one off the list! Onto the next project....
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The basic fold and cut to create the pop outs.
The concertina structure is made
up of multiple sections, each having this fold & cut
in the valley fold. |
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| The concertina book showing the pop outs on the prints |
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| The reverse side after the gelatine printing |
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Clipping the book together before glueing to
check it all works (generally a good idea!) |
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The completed book with covers tied together,
so it becomes a carousel type structure. |
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| The book closed, revealing the triangular structure. Nice! |
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| A sexy viewpoint...i love those seductive folds! |
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A different view, with the book open lying on its covers.
Playing around with display the finished book gives me
more ideas how I could use this structure again. |
