Sick Fools and the Healing Wisdom of Trees

Positive thought for the day - at least when I can finally show things at my next un-cancelled show I won't be taking along books with slightly inkwet pages...

on the other hand I have now got so deep in new ideas that the next stage of binding the sewn cartoneras is receding into the distance; but I have plenty of time now....
I got straight up and started thinking over more ideas; first I went for my constitutional around the graveyard, trying to avoid the times that are getting a bit crowded with dogwalkers....

I found myself thinking about chance and portents - yesterday my hank of special grey coloured bookbinding thread ran out  just as I finished sewing up the last book - there was a good feeling about this - an 'amount you can plough in a day' sort of feeling....
and then first thing when I opened my British Museum catalogue of the Egyptian day of the Dead (which suddenly looked as if it might be useful) it fell open at the page with a figure 'receiving liquid from a tree goddess' - lovely , I knew it was going to be useful for my meditations on sick fools and the healing and wisdom of trees; it is quite an unusual image.....

Once back I carried on browsing and made more scribbles in my notebook, alongside yesterdays bandaged fools with shopping trolleys, meditations on Frankenstein, the odd deposition, unravellings...  the great thing about a sketchbook of ideas is to mix up all the drawn images together and they start to make new connections.

At the end of a day like yesterday it is hard to feel whether you have achieved anything, it can feel like idling - but you probably have and your dreams the next night might sort things out further.....  

I am beginning to see how the Sick Fool idea can now join with the tree images I started to make as new set of playing card images, might all meet up together. I might start cutting some more tomorrow, although some feel they will also need to be developed bigger - size matters and images demand their own size sometimes; the playing card ones are very small but are useful for trying ideas out

these are some of the previous ones I did - trial runs with some miniature Ship of Fools images too - I was going to try out making some sort of peepshow forest with them but had to stop to finish other things

here are a couple of blocks too....

and below some of the drawings they were based on - I was using particular trees that I love from my regular walks  - they may look a bit faint as in pencil.... I really love the ones I can stand inside and almost wear like a coat....and ones with extraordinary faces

I will try and have some of the new ones I will start cutting to show tomorrow; I have been distracted by the wonderful 8pm moment of people in my road opening their windows and doors and clapping for the NHS workers; lots of us did, including the next door dog barking which added to the volume; so good to do as my friends further down have two family members on the front line , running a corona ward...

and John Tomlinson told Sean Rafferty when on Radio 3 at 6pm he might sing out of his window but we couldn't hear him in the clear night air sadly, he's a few roads away.....he sang happy birthday to his neighbour yesterday through the house wall with his big deep bass voice and they could hear and banged back....

All Sewn Up - more micro ramblings....

Such a lovely sunny day it was hard to find a dark corner to photo these - but all done now. I don't usually do as many cartoneras as 22 at a time but with all this enforced time.....
the last sets were more like 12 I think....

I got excited about some new possible images forming in my mind yesterday evening but today the impetus for continuing sewing up over-rode doing anything about them straight away - I only had a couple more to do....this is called the gumption trap. By the afternoon I realised those murky images lurking in my creative centre were getting fainter, less embodied in my hands and legs - yes legs, I need to roam around looking at stuff and trying things out; in better times I would probably walk down the road not talking to anyone while inside my head it was a ferment ( had to make do with a quick twirl round the graveyard opposite today but now that is getting crowded with desperate walkers and dogs)
 - but though still excited I am putting things off...

this is where the cosily therapeutic of sewing kicks in, and it can also seem so sensible and virtuous, getting it done and finished  ( lordy shouldn't be using that phrase again, tainted forever)
- but it is the gumption trap having a small victory and the creativity suffering.
I could make a whole extrapolation from this, comparing the bourgeois life style, sensible reasoning and getting some sleep, up there with tidiness and cleanliness, with the mad artist in a garret but I won't linger with it....
A propos -I have been reading a wonderful book written in the mid eighties I think by Robert Irwin, The Limits of Vision ( thanks Rose - a wonderful present) - it is very darkly funny and horribly insightful; and very topical as it is all about microbes and obsessions....

but I digress.....

I have another  woman friend, an artist, who once told me she always worked 'cold' - waited to see if an idea lasted and was therefore truly worth doing; its an interesting idea with a logic to it - but I think I operate best on ' hot', for good or ill ( and I am always very hot physically when I am working, the calories burning off the top of my head) although the gumption trap is always lurking, especially first thing in the morning even tho I am a morning person ( as well as a night owl). 

But by the afternoon today I was scribbling some preparatory drawings in my fat notebook and once started didn't want to stop.

It is going to be very hard to post photos as they are very faint and wispy - ideas sometimes so fragile that I am cautious to commit them too firmly to paper before their time; they are imagination stimulators like Leonardo's blots on the walls; James the poet I work with says he is the only person who can extrapolate anything from them at this sort of stage but it is because we are so used to rummaging around in each others heads....

more tomorrow....

bookmaking corona diary day/part 2; sewing up...

Sewing up is usually therapeutic but for the newspaper pages for cartoneras it is fraught with danger and you have to be constantly alert.....the paper is so fragile, now more a palimpsest of layers of ink rather than paper. The pages are thin enough to do a pamphlet sewing stitch really but then it doesn't work for the pagination because I have printed across a whole newspaper page image which is then folded to a more manageable size.
I usually want to work like a maniac and and get one job finished at a time but with 22 of these I think it needs to be staggered, alternated with some thing more creative, but I am finding it hard and the constant interruptions trying to co-ordinate new deliveries of food and milk with my immediate neighbours isn't conducive to long trains of thought so repetitive work to drop in and out of is useful  - tho I notice how it takes a few minutes to get back into the rhythm as I was describing yesterday...
The overwhelming smell of printing ink on these particular pages is mitigated by the glorious smell of Spring flowers sent by my daughter.....

The new etiquette of deliveries and social distancing. plus the accompanying hand-washing is playing havoc with my disappearing nails and rough skin is just not good for book-binding dexterity....

Getting our newspaper is now difficult under this new regime of isolation so we may have to abandon it - I am suddenly assailed by the alarming thought that newspapers may all go online instead - and never return, then what will I do for future projects....the end of my cartoneras maybe; I was just starting to think about the sequel to Ship of Fools - which came after Map of Lost Cuckoos about species extinction , the next one was possibly going to be Fool Gets Sick...
good job I have boxes of papers still, my hoarding justified but the current topical ones could be  important.....I hope someone I know is saving them.....fortunately I did a big trawl for cardboard packaging round town before lockdown....
dealing with current events in this way is my way of communicating I suppose, first with myself, interrogating the world, and then by the showing to other people - which I hope will happen eventually...

Once sewn and bound the format - tall and narrow - makes the books surprisingly robust; I hope they look like little dossiers with their manilla coloured cardboard covers. They are supposed to look raw and immediate so I hope all this relaxed extra time hasn't made me fidget with them too much; maybe there are genuine improvements but opinion will probably vary South American cartoneras are now sometimes accused accused of looking too aesthetic....

I am usually a person who just likes to get things done but maybe now is the time for more reflection - in the daytime while sewing rather than in the middle of the night maybe...
a subject for tomorrow maybe .....

Covid Art Diary starts here Update on Spring events for parvenu press

I have been waiting for some final decisions but it is an ever-changing situation , however the Oxford Fine Press fair is now definitely cancelled for next weekend and due to take place in November instead - but given the rather ageist nature of this virus and current rumours and advice, whether some of us will ever get there remains to be seen.
London Craft week has been also been postponed until the early Autumn - I was due to take art with work at the ArtWorkers Guild in Holborn;
also at Turn the Page - TTP - at the Forum in Norwich, this has also been postponed until May next year 2021- which will hopefully be a more virus free zone and something to look forward to.....
I was excited that my book Map of Lost Cuckoos about small wildlife under risk of extinction in Britain, which I sold to the British Library last year, was being displayed there next to the original Magna Carta I was told by friends...but that library is now closed and I haven't been able to get up to London and look......

I am still working hard on finishing books that were 'nearly there' for the Oxford Fair and although I now feel as though I have been given a rare gift of time and it is nice to be released from the pressure of deadlines, it feels strange, despite always working for my own satisfaction and as a matter of compulsion, to be working on things that no-one will see for possibly some time , and especially as some of the work was supposed to be quite topical....

So I may now use this blog currently to to think about work and time and as a diary in these new  circumstances - with images as the work gets finished and in different stages....
am currently working on binding the cartonera versions of the Ship of Fools - see previous post for the original version and scroll back to this time last year for stuff about cartoneras....

I am always accused of working too hard, but quite apart from doing what I love there are good practical reasons which make it inevitable. Making books as art dictates its own timescales. most of the processes are so arduous that they open up a conundrum: whether the result is going to be worth all the effort is a decision asking to be made at the point at which it quite impossible to know ; it has to be an act of faith - but one certainly wants to be done as quickly as possible, so one can find out. And also before it goes off the boil. And a new obsession comes pressingly along.

The practical processes have their own rhythms; stopping and starting alters the flow and shows - the knowledge of what I am doing lasts as long as the task and gets harder to retrieve; the muscle memory has its own duration and then moves on elsewhere - to the next task. Spending too long would be like taking a day to tell a joke. Momentum gathers so I stay up until it is done; it also means I don't have to clean my blocks too often and get back straight into work the next morning....

One trick is to know how to decide the number of pages and repeats from the start, in the same way that the measurement an acre is the amount a farmer can plough in a day. And it wasn't an accident that my first book, Gawain, was designed to be finished in a year and a day, just like the quest contained in the story.

And age is the elephant in the room too. Ars Longa Vita Brevis. So many ideas and so little time in which to follow them up.

more tomorrow - and hopefully soon some pics......

Fine Press Book Fair 2020 Examination Schools Oxford

I will once again be exhibiting at the Fine Press Book Fair in Oxford 28-29 March.

Among other work ( paper theatres, tarot/playing cards, tunnel books etc - depending what gets finished!) - I will be showing new work with themes of Climate Crisis, Ship of Fools (with acknowledgement to Hieronymous Bosch and Sebastian Brant), as a woodcut concertina book and as cartoneras printed over newspaper pages featuring climate disasters of various types - see below for wet pages waiting to be cut and bound.

I will try and add more images and information as  I go on in the next couple of weeks.....

see the Fine Press Book Association website for further details about the fair..... 

Pollocks Gallimaufry

....Less than two weeks to go - images right way up this time - first few scenes and the last theatre - come along and see the rest from 8th November until 7th December - see post below

Pollocks Toy Theatres exhibition - Pollocks Gallimaufry

Have been beavering away at paper toy theatres so not much sign of my recently - apart from signing Voyaging Out in London bookshops ( Hatchards Piccadilly with Maggie Humm and Tate Modern bookshop with Michele Roberts - both lovely events ...)
and I forgot to post up the recent review by John May - see post below this one for the link..... - many thanks to John for his kind words....

I was going to paste up some images of work in progress but I see we are in Baselitz mode again -
however it will all the more exciting for you when you see them the right way sound and in 3D - bought wood and lights this morning so all getting very exciting...
this first theatre is inspired by Mister Blake and Catherine ( glad to see she is getting her due at the wonderful new Blake exhibition at Tate Britain) and Mister Tom Paine - a dialogue around Romanticism and Reason....
Theatre Two continues the story with a Heading for Extinction theme - more pics to come - possibly also with the world turned upside down....