wordless wednesday .....

beach walk ...

My daughter was home for a few days during the week ...... 

The first thing she asked was that we head home to our hills via the beach,  she wanted to get her feet in the sand and smell the salt, have that wind brush away the urban grit.  We live so close to the beach and yet I am so often reluctant to head down amongst the crowds.  During the week however, with the wind blowing and the sky overcast, many of the beaches along our coast are almost empty.  I love those times best. Sea foam and silverlight.  Tide marks. Times shared and remembered along the shore.

This is a book I made a couple of years ago - a large 60cm x 24cm book, embossed and framing some of the work I have done with shells and beach debris.  For me, the process of letting go of the drawings and working with the marks has been something I have been learning, and trusting more often.  The gesture, the mark ..... rather than revealing all the details.  

wordless wednesday ...

two books meet ...

This afternoon my daughter Pip, who is visiting from Sydney for a couple of days, and I visited Fiona to bring our books together for their photo shoot.  Fiona and I have created two magical books this week to celebrate World Book Day.  Not perfect books, but magical.  I chose this word quite carefully as there has been a sense of wonder and unexpected surprise, a gorgeous alchemy of our thoughts, words, marks and effort as our books began, merged and finally unveiled.

The light in the studio was luminous and even so, it was quite difficult to capture the books together .  Fiona's long and lean, crisp and rigid, mine rectangular and softly bound, mellow, not wanting to stand.

Of the many taken, a few images stood out for me - these really just show the structure of our books and not the content.  They actually blend together tenderly with their threads and markings, tracemarks and  images echoing each other's and yet they remain simultaneously individual.

shadow play

My completed book although this photo was taken before I titled it 'In Between the Mountains'.  There is a story about this which I will share at the end of this blog.

Fiona's words concealed through scratched transparencies 

etchings  and pierced translucent paper

hidden etchings - the transparent layer lifts to reveal these in detail

Fiona's white pages and thread from our day working together 

My last page bringing all the ideas I had together 

Fiona's delicious threads

This shared collaborative experience has been both intriguing and absorbing.  Throughout, our sensibilities have been in tune with each other and I think this remained so right until the finishing touches were being made on the books.

I must share this story with you ...........

I brought along my book, with eight pages, to be worked into by Fiona.  All I had done was make two of those pages from some of my etchings and suggested was that I was doing a soft cover book which I wanted to be read in landscape format which meant that the binding was on the top of the pages, not left or right.  Fiona introduced her beautiful words to my book, though did so on tracing paper in order that I could conceal them in my mountains, or let them peek in between.  She also worked two of my pages with smaller white pages secured under thread lines.  Beautiful.  Once I began to work back into the book I decided I really wanted to have Fiona's words visible between the mountains and I pondered hard over whether I should just copy them or trace them onto the page.  Somehow it didn't seem right so I asked Fiona if I could bring my pages back for her to rewrite the words onto the page ..... and of course she was more than happy to oblige.

It was not until I was home again, fiddling with the last touches, that I realised that Fiona had actually written a second verse instead of using her initial verse twice.  She had absorbed what I had worked into my pages, into the story I was telling, and I think tied it all together in the second verse. By so doing she had supplied my book with the cohesion it needed.

Here are the two verses that Fiona has written in my book (the first verse written by Aaron Siskind and lent to me!) because you can't read them without holding the book, taking back the transparent layer and looking closely 'In Between the Mountains' ...

'if you look very intensely
     and slowly
         things will happen
                 that you never dreamed of before'


'in the hollows
      and the voids
             between the mountains
                    quiet dreams of beauty are born.'


That says it all.

the beginning of something wonderful ...

I couldn't wait until tomorrow.

Have been smiling all week

and totally absorbed.

Sometimes it only takes a nudge in a different direction

to help you realise something you have

been trying to say.

Thank you Fiona.

Just  a small glimpse again at some of the images formed in my 'our' book.  Tomorrow will be such a celebration of what we have done this week when the two books meet again for their photo shoot!

paper love ... paper camera

How delicious are these images.  I could post them on a 'Wordless Wednesday' and not have to say anything about them but I want to speak a little about computer imaging and its relationship to my art.

I remember back in 2001 doing an Adobe Photoshop course through the Brisbane Institute of Art - Adobe for the artist, not the techno person. Perfect.  I had enormous fun ..... as we all do and every time I played with an image using one of their 'effects' which rendered my initial image in some magnificent way I remember thinking that I was cheating.  That these images were not mine but some form of magic that took my marks, or my drawings and made something hugely exciting from them.  Felt like cheating to me and I confess, when I see images like those I have just posted I experience that sense again.  I can look at these images and say 'aren't they delicious' because it is not like I did them at all.

Of course there is the profound reality that it is from the marks we make, and the design we put into play that these images are formed.  Those below were taken whilst waiting in the car, I had these writing drawings of mine beside me, incomplete as they were, and I remembered Fiona had mentioned the application for iPhones 'Paper Camera' in one of her blogs (or was it an email?).  I played for a few minutes with some of the different settings and this is the result.

These images could certainly be worked over again by hand to make them seem more like mine ..... but in the meantime, I enjoy having a toy with which I can have the occasional frivol.

On a much more serious note, Fiona and I have both been very busy on 'our' books and the experience has been extraordinary.  Both of us having a wonderful time working our artwork into the images that were handed to us after our day working together on Monday.  A few people have left comments for us saying how difficult working in this way can be but I must say that after that initial fear the night before, the process has been challenging, absorbing, thrilling and deeply satisfying.  We met together briefly this morning as we needed to emboss our marks on the back pages of the books before we sew them.  It is quite easy to forget this along the way....

Both of us are very close to resolving and binding our books and I could not resist the chance to photograph the gathering of  'stuff'  as I was packing up my pages to bring home.  Now I will sit down and finish the book because from now until Monday when we have committed to having our books completed, I have friends and family coming, surrounding and distracting.  Wouldn't change that though.  So, till Monday ... this is a quick peek.

wordless wednesday ...