Tuesday at college

This morning, we six part-timers had a seminar at college with Helen Douglas of Weproductions. (I'd bought a copy of her Wild Wood (1999) years ago, before ever planning or even hoping to do a book arts course.)

After saying a few words about ourselves (background and projects) we did a couple of writing exercises. The first was about "keeping one's eye open to the present" - we wrote for 5 minutes, being as specific as possible, about something that happened recently. What to choose? I remembered taking this photo of Tony and Thomas putting the clock back up in the kitchen -
Then we wrote, also being a specific as possible, about a book we'd really like to make. Uh ... this was something (amazingly!) I'd not really thought about - it took only 5 minutes to change that.

We read through our writing, underlining about 10 words in each passage.

Working in pairs, we read out the writing and the other person then said what words they remembered. This was interesting both in terms or requiring close listening, and in terms of comparing our "important" words with what came through to the other person.

After a general discussion, we each presented some current work. Mine was the little trial books I'd made with the bits of fabric I'd printed recently. Some had stitched lines - machine-stitched on heavy paper, or hand stitched on tracing paper. It transpired that I hadn't mentioned textiles at all in introducing myself - I'd got caught up in my library and publishing background, and completely forgotten the major role of textiles in my art life! Which just goes to show, sometimes you simply take things for granted....

It was great to see, at more leisure than in the first, crowded, symposium, what people were interested in and working on, and how people's work connects to each other. Book titles and artists' names were thrown into the ring. Helen is coming back for another seminar in March. The six of us agreed to meet up on Wednesdays before the research methods lectures - this should provide a little motivation for actually making work.

I spent the rest of the day in the luxurious pursuit of art journals in the library. A particularly apposite article in "Blue Notebook" talked about how artists who make books "make reading" - promising the reading experience even when the artist subverts it.

And I managed to survive a whole day of not having my camera with me - there it was on the table when I got home.