This week at college

The main event of the week was the crit - I'd spent the weekend making not just the one book but, thanks to Tony's help with printing out my underground pix and his supply of velvety-black paper, another book as well. I was adding the final text about five minutes before dashing out the door with absolutely no time to spare, but had been able to work calmly most of the morning.

We were divided into groups of six, to be seen one group at a time, and the theory was that each group would have an hour, with some overflow time. Well you know it goes - everyone always needs more time, and unfortunately the people at the end of the session are the ones who lose out. (Talking about this later, we thought it would be best if there was a timekeeper from among the students at these sessions.)

It was fascinating to see what the others had come up with on the theme of "place-encounter-time", and it would have been even better to see the work of everyone in the class. I hope these brief descriptions (you will have to imagine what the objects looked like!) will give you an idea of the many possibilities in "book art" -

Natalie explored her ceiling in photographs, with the non-cooperation of her printer - which made for some unexpected but exciting results, lots of ideas...

CJ had textures, to be felt through slits in the paper, and glimpsed through those slits (subtle but interesting), and also a video on his phone of a jar with a bright butterfly fluttering around in it - not a real butterfly, but controlled remotely. Unfortunately he'd broken the jar, so just had the video, and some samples of the black paper butterflies that were crowded onto the lid. Again, that accident led to a different angle and lots of possibilities for development.

Laura's long cloth book with the inked line was based on ideas from geology, with the ink seeping through the gauze and giving the feeling of landscape. But even better was the simple napkin, folded into a triangle, that she'd blobbed some paint into - opened completely out, it revealed a calm, clean centre.

Janet's work was based on a tombstone in the churchyard across the road and included text describing an imagined encounter; two gorgeous boxes - one with a prayer book reworked into images of the moon, the other with a mossy bird's nest; photographs taken in the churchyard; and a book with rubbings, in charcoal and in soil, of the word "sacred" from various tombstones.

Mi-Young had strong images cut out of black paper, put onto a vivid watercolour background, embodying the theme of death. She also had some sculptured elements made of book pages, and is working towards animation, using these elements separately or together.

And now my own finished books, starting with the tiny prototype -

and the background information, including an unsuccessful attempt to find a fascinating place, and some strips of photos taken inside tube tunnels pretty much as they came out of the printer -

Those strips, joined, made the first book. The white lines were felt to be disruptive (I agree) -

It flops nicely from hand to hand, but even if you play with it, it's easy to miss the quote on the other side -

The "flash of memory at a moment of danger" quote is written on the back of the photos of the stretch from King's Cross to Russell Square, where 26 people were killed, and many injured, in the 7 July 2005 bombing. On the back of the photos taken in King's Cross station is the date 18 November 1987, the date of the fire in which 31 people died and 60 were injured, and at the end of the quote is the 7 July date. (Like many people in London I have such vivid memories of that time - even though I wasn't in at work when the bus blew up outside the building - and think about it every time I use that part of the Piccadilly Line.)

On to the next book - at 8am the photos were stuck in and the text was sort of ready, but I still had no title -
It's two journeys, Arsenal to Finsbury Park and Finsbury Park to Highbury&Islington - one on one side of the page, and the other on the reverse. The place where tunnel has a gap occurs at pretty much the same place on both sides of the pages - but a reader probably wouldn't even notice that!
That was the train on the other line, flashing by ... and in the next frames the train is stopped in the "tunnel void" -

The text is automatic announcements, the driver's announcement explaining why the train stopped (since the bombings, they do that all the time), and the traveller's thoughts.

Change trains -

The "ghost train" reappears in the other journey (I had my camera pressed to the glass each time I travelled that line, all week). And finally we get to the end ... and can start all over again ... just like the daily commute ...

Suggested improvements - better-quality pix (now I've tried using "burst" mode - goodness you get a lot of photos from one journey); printing the whole thing, with alternate pages printed black, probably with grey words; taking the photos to the top and bottom edges rather than having a border; having the photos not fill each page, as though they themselves were travelling, or bits in shadow.

Title? "Appearances ..." at the start; "...are glimpses of the unseen" on the other cover. Thanks to Walter Benjamin and Anaxagoras for kindly providing the quotes.

As for the rest of the week at college, there was lunch with the crit group afterwards, the usual informal chat before the Wednesday lecture (though some of us skipped the lecture and went to see the book arts BA interim show at LCC instead), and a lot of screenprinting.