Serendipity in SE15

Because of the tube strike, and a subsequent day when the Victoria Line train dumped everyone at Highbury to get on the next train, I discovered a new route to college, via Dalston Junction, the East London Line, and New Cross. In the autumnal sunshine, the walk to the bus stop was pleasant, and if I hadn't been late already, I might have stopped for coffee at The London Particular -

Along the route were some portents of the economic downturn -

Later it got cheerier again, for instance this example of Rus In Urbes -

Art I like - Clare Bryan and Tracy Bush

While in the college library last week I indulged in a morning of reading some of the art magazines. The New Bookbinder had an article on two artists who worked with paper rather than text. One is Clare Bryan, whose wonderful white books of trees I'd seen when doing her summer school course at West Dean -The other is Tracey Bush, who has done a series of works on the river Thames, starting with the embossed example on the left -
The embossing is done using Somerset paper and a collagraph plate, built up of layers of card, in an etching press.

Autumnal

Calendar idea

Brilliant - a list of when those books are due back at the library. I need one of these! Available from Aunt June's etsy shop. More exciting calendars are here.

Playing with books

"Playing With Books, the Art of Upcycling, Deconstructing and Reimagining the Book" features 26 book-related projects for both beginner and advanced book artists -- transforming a book into a bag, turning book pages into flowers, creating a flower vase from a book, etc.

It looks, from the pages shown here, that many of the projects could as easily be made from sheets of paper as from the pages of actual books. Better to give your unwanted volumes to the charity shop?

More studio progress

On coming home from the weekend at Tony's, this is the sight that that met my delighted eyes -

The worktop is in place, the shelves have been emptied and cut in half and in place, and a nice empty place above the shelves awaits wall cabinets.

Under the new worktop, about half of the contents of the shelves (the other half cascades across the floor - too sordid a sight to reveal) -
These items can't be put back on the shelves till the wall cabinets have been built.

Meanwhile, the plastic wheely towers have arrived -
They "just" need to be filled with the most essential of the items that are piled in the furthest corner of the room. It'll be good to have the book making supplies more or less together in one, and print making supplies in another...

Meanwhile, at Tony's, the kitchen is making good progress - the new plastering is drying, ready for painting by the end of the week if all goes well. Picture rail needs to be put up, skirting boards revitalised, and the ceiling lighting system installed in the kitchen. We're still looking for a nice light for over the table - one that takes a bigger bulb than 60 watts.

In the art shop

Very exciting to see that the college art shop has tracing papers in many colours - £1.25 a sheet.

Art school graffiti

Third cubicle along, ladies loos, Wilson Road building. The random combinations, in the row of cubicles, of black tanks and black or white loo seats there is "arty" too.

Letterpress

It was very exciting to find out about the letterpress workshop and typesetting. This is a facility that isn't all that common in art colleges - when digital came along, most places threw out all the old-fashioned type - and now they're regretting it.

I knew a little about the topic - but it turned out to be a very little. When I was teaching at a school for the deaf all those years ago, I saw a linotype machine in action - back then many deaf lads were trained as typesetters, as it was thought the noisy environment wouldn't bother them.

Metal type goes up to 72 point, and larger type is wooden. Furniture, spacing, etc is measured in picas (12 points to a pica) - you can see some furniture in the frame, and also the quoins that lock the type in. On the papers are the layouts of the cases of type - something to memorise -
We each set a line of type, which was moved onto a galley and locked in with powerful magnets. This is the amount of ink (oil-based) you need to roll out for inking up a thin film on the type -

Here it is, printed up - there was time for each of us to set our name, and to print a copy -

Around the room, examples of work -

The alphabet is "quite a local font", said James (who is in charge of the facility) - it's called Flaxman and was designed by Edward Wright, who taught at Chelsea. The "&" shows clearly how the etcetra symbol is a ligature made up of E and t.

Elsewhere, before and after -
On the subject of kerning (the spacing between letters) - "RAILWAY" is a tricky word to space out; you can see that without intervention there are lots of strange white spaces between letters. Here's how the adjustment is done with wooden type -

The recommended book is Robert Bringhurst's "The Elements of Typographic Style", which was first published in 1992 and has many revised editions - quite tricky (and pricey) to buy online.

On the way out, we stopped to see the laser cutting machine in the 3D workshop, another facility available for student use.

Book art from Brazil

The seminar this week was a presentation by Edith Derdyk, a Brazilian book artist. Her website opens with photos of black threads "sewn" across the corners of a room, and her work encapsulates and builds on the physical movement of drawing lines, of this sort of sewing - moving from one place to another repeatedly - and of the repeated turning of pages. This trajectory, the line, is the poetic core and the substance of her work - she sees it as a way of building thought.

As well as showing us many slides (to show books in action takes many slides!), Edith brought along some examples of her books. This book, simply put together, contains a selection of pages from her many sketchbooks -

This square book is a compilation of photograph of power lines and telephone lines, which are everywhere in Brazil. It's printed on one long sheet of paper -
My favourite was printed on thin paper and came in two versions, silkscreened and digitally printed. Edith printed one sheet of paper over and over again, using files already on her computer. Sometimes the paper was so inky that it tore in the printer. The thickness of ink and fragility of paper in the final versions made it a wonderful object -
"If the whole sea is under the river" has signatures of four different widths, and the text area expands and compresses like waves or a tide. All the words - nouns and adjectives, no verbs (all the action is in the movement of the text) - are to do with water -
Many copies of the book were mounted in a line on the wall in a 2008 exhibition (see photos here) which also included large, overlapping piles of large sheets of paper -- making a profile of lines.

In 2007 Edith had a residency at Banff School of Arts and developed a very flexible binding for "Slipping" - each landscape-format page is sewn on separately, giving a marvellous movement -
In the 1980s she drew a children's book that required the child (or parent) to participate by cutting the pages into thirds, so they could be combined into many different stories. Currently she's involved in more children's books that require the "reader" to participate in reconfiguring a sheet of paper into a folded book with many possible variants.

Studio renovation - more progress

The worktop will be double the current size, and wheeled "towers" of plastic boxes will go under it (three of these and one of these). The boxes are 40cm deep, so there's room for a shelf, and my two "old" sewing machines, behind them.

Not much progress on the sorting and decluttering, though!

Studio renovation - some logistics

When I left home this morning, all my fabric was in (a) a big cupboard; (b) another "cupboard" which is actually drawers; (c) the corner of the room where the ironing board used to live; or (d) the corner of the room where the bed used to be. Oh, and all the white fabric was (and is) happily and neatly in the wire baskets in the airing cupboard, along with the ailing boiler.

When I returned this afternoon, my domestic assistant and home project manager had moved cupboard (b) - but not before moving the heaps from (c), in front of it, further into the corner, indeed into most of the rest of the room. Heaps at location (d) also needed to be shifted, so that cupboard (a) could be moved beside cupboard (b)'s new position.
Cupboard (a) is solid and heavy. Everything had to come out so that it could be moved - and the only place left was the landing ... and kitchen -
The cupboard has been moved, the contents returned to it. The project manager wants to get on with the building bit.

When the worktop is extended into the vacant corner, stackable plastic boxes will go under it, to hold the fabric currently in cupboard (a) and corners (c) and (d). Will it all fit? - well, that's a rhetorical question ... I know lots of it simply has to go.

A real question: where to get stackable transparent plastic boxes? The bottom one in each stack should have wheels, and they should be quite big - and preferably the higher ones in the stack should be about half the depth of the wheeled one. Impossible??

From the library

The college library didn't have a volume of Edward Thomas's poetry (as discussed in "the poet and the path" series of The Essay (on Radio 3) by Andrew Motion last week) but it did have this -

and of course it came home with me. £65 to buy - free to borrow from the library (well, I did have to pay student fees to be able to use the library).

This is my favourite spread so far -
And here is a fabric book I didn't know about, "Dawn" -
The exhibition was good - and this book has a lot more of Louise Bourgeois' works than were in the show.

Textile screen printing

One of the highlights of last week was the introduction to the textile screen printing room.

Yummy leftover colours! And here's the difference between using the transparent binder (the orange on the left) and the opaque -
The process: a good amount of colour on the screen -
squeegee it down and then up again. Don't let the paint dry in the screen (I found out later what happens - the lines start to clog up, not good). Pressure hose makes washing easy -
This contraption stretches the mesh (net curtaining) and it gets glued onto the screen -
Making a screen - it needs black-and-white artwork. I used blown-up photocopies of some journey lines -
The screen is coated with emulsion and exposing it transfers the image -
When the screen is washed, the unexposed emulsion (black areas) washes out -
Into the drying cabinet -
The drying racks for the prints are in another room -
My first print, using two different screens -
Towards the end of the day I was using puffa paste and fabric samples that were on hand -
Some of the small samples cry out to be made into little books -

Textile printing results

Above, transparent binder; below, puffa paste (after puffing) -
And here are my first "little books" - just blank pamphlets inside, and just experiments to work towards making effective covers out of the printed fabric -
The large one has machine stitching to outline some of the raised lines; the pink and yellow have fabric bonded onto the printed fabric, and the pamphlet sewn in; and the pale one has the paper attached to the cover with bondaweb.

Print induction

On Wednesday the whole book arts group spent a couple of hours touring the print facilities, learning what was available and being reminded of how to use it (and what not to do). This is the screenprinting room, with its tables, drying racks, and screen storage. There's also an etching room, and a relief printing and lithography room.

At the start of term it all looks at its best - the technicians have been cleaning it up all summer.

I took a lot of notes - it's a lot of information, especially if you haven't done a lot of printmaking before. Best to concentrate on just one process, I think.

The letterpress department in the basement needs its own induction, next week -
Afterwards, some of us went to the Move: Choreographing You exhibition at the Hayward.