All in artist books

Mapping Chaos

When systems fall into chaos, it’s time to get creative and start imaginative mapping. Creating a visual representation of how you want life to look helps bring that future into reality. Chaos and entropy are natural parts of systems under pressure and from them can emerge new order and stability. Hold that thought!!!

Success (and some failures)

We are taught to reach for perfection, yet that sets us up for failure every time. Printmaking in any form has a strong ‘perfection’ element and to make blurry prints which messy edges is not considered to be technically correct. Yet what if you reframe that idea to turn seeming failures into successes. Perhaps it is a truer reflection of living life in all its messiness.

Art of Pain

When one image is not enough to tell a story, then artist books are a great way to combine pictures with text. I have been wanting to find a way to show pain through its relief and have started planning the structure for an artist book. How the materials and narrative work together is an exciting journey of discovery.

Possibilities

There are so many things you could make, it can be hard to know where to start. I’ve been making blank notebooks using up old prints that I folded to become the little book covers. Creating these notebooks has put me back into ‘maker mode’. What will go inside them? The possibilities are endless.

Published

Self publishing is a fantastic way to create a printed catalogue of your art project. The images in a book retain the essence of place, the sounds heard and smells experienced there as well as a document of art created ‘on site’. Books can become ambassadors of your work, able to travel and represent you when you can’t be there yourself.

Collage Your Life

Creating collages, every day for more than years has given me a creative practice, a visual diary and ways to work through some of my ideas on a small scale. Now some of these collages are featured in a new book Collage Your Life by USA artist /author Melanie Mowinski.

"Have you Gaelic?"

Being gifted Gaelic titles for some of my artworks while in Scotland has given me the key to a map of landscape. My accordion fold artist book Pilgrim Stranger with its Gaelic name Coigrich Taistealach has unlocked this landscape as a place of mystery which I have entered as a pilgrim.

Repurposed

Repurposing your old artworks releases the energy stored in your materials. When you are deep in your creative flow, the impulse that brought you to create at that time is captured in the materials. Like stones, they hold energetic vibrations of your thoughts and emotions which can be tapped into to tell a new story.

Love Songs

There’s so much been written about love in poems, songs, letters and books. Classic romances and cheap romantic paperbacks, they all have a place in fiction. And why not? It’s a day for silly love songs and picking flowers.