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Anabasis: First Books

On my last visit to my studio, I started making some books based on the sketches and photos that I did in January. I used the technique that I almost always use these days: taking xeroxes of the drawings and sketches, playing around with the resolution at Kinko's, then transferring them to paper using the paper-litho transfer process.

Here's the first one (works in progress, again):


The image is from a map of all the coal mines in the area of north-east England where I grew up. I printed it in ochre on four strips of paper, then in blue on four more strips of paper, and then braided them together so that you see alternating squares of different coloured maps. I'm going to layer more strips of prints over them, then sew them all together on a base. The idea I have in mind is that you will peel back the upper strips until this is revealed at the bottom of the pile.

Then I took the 'vortex' picture that I drew at the beginning of January, and printed it on something called a jogged pamphlet:


In this case, nine pages are nested, one inside the other, each one getting progressively longer from left to right. Printed like this, the image will appear whole when the pages are closed. When you open the pages, something else will be printed on the inside:



Printmaking, and making artist's books: my two most trusted and favourite activities at the moment.

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