Cutting the fine paws, long snouts and narrow tails with scissors, I glue them in place, after a few scene changes toyed with, and then, once dry, they are whisked under press. This is my process, my pattern, and, as you have seen these past few posts, this is how they later look in book form, open and laid on tabletop. Held in individual book cradles made by Louise (who has the finger cuts to wear as proof of hard labour), these stands support the books and allow for the peering, their triangular shape (with thanks to Pythagoras) mirroring that of the beautiful table legs made by Erik North for Craft Victoria’s use.
In total I have made, especially for this exhibition, twenty-one collaged books. Some were mercifully six pages in length (Primary transport for the dispelling of fallacious beliefs), but most were somewhere between eighteen to twenty-four pages. Some were made in conjunction with others, and some were made on their own. It will come as no great astonishment that all afforded me joy to make. Even those books which chose not to lie flat (thereby making the gluing of a rodent's long tail or boar's hairy snout that fell perilously too near to the spine all the harder).
But this is but one small part of A key to make your own world visible. On the gallery walls there hangs now, until the end of November, Louise’s watercolour works (sixteen in total, four of which are collaborative), several collaborative prints in frames (thanks to Margaret and Colin of the Frame Spot), and a block of my postcard collages, too. Upon a shelf by the window sits Louise’s Especially for you, a collection housed, and our 12 page concertina-bound artists’ book, This evening, however, I am thinking of things past. It is a crowded affair. Bare is not our hallmark.
+ As Louise saw it, photos from the installation.
+ As Esther Van Doornum and Kim Brockett for Craft Victoria saw it, photos from the opening night. (Can you spot me? Can you spot Louise? Can you, perhaps, spot yourself?)
{Exhausting all possible avenues. Collage and pencil across the pages of a small red-covered book of cartes vues détachables of Abbay d’ Aulne, Bruxelles.}
