Last week at college

On Tuesday, a tutorial. I should be trying to stick with one concept - making a series of "pages" rather than different little books - pushing one concept along, developing it.

On Wednesday, pure pleasure - a bookbinding workshop - 

sewing over tapes -

In the finished book, the tapes are visible under the endpapers - a possible site for other inclusions and shadowy effects -

At the last moment something went awry with endpaper gluing, and one end of my book's spine ... has "character" -

In the afternoon's Research Methods lecture, Johanna Love talked about her PhD work - starting with the notion of drawing on the surface of digital prints, she then scanned in prints at different distances from the scanner, resulting in fuzzier and darker images with increasing distance. The surprise was the intrusion of dust particles disrupting the surface, and it is this dust effect that is at the centre of her research.

Another "narrative of the surface" was given by Jim Threapleton, whose PhD work is also on the degradation of the surface, this time in removal of paint from the surface, like these which are oil on steel -