Book Art Object - nearing completion

I am quite excited than in amongst it all last week I actually got time to sit down and get down and nearly finish my BAO books!  I hope that by the end of this week I will actually have them in the post to people which will be a big relief for me and for Ronnie (who needs them for the display at the Impact 7 Conference in Melbourne in September).

It has been quite a challenge for me to consider how to produce an edition of 15 or so books, when what I mostly do is pour all my love and attention into doing a single, one-off book - a unique edition.

There is the initial question about what do I want to do? Do I want to do a  rendition - i.e. reproduce the poem in full; or do I want to do a response to the poem - i.e.my interpretation of it?

Having determined the content of the work I then had to think through the materials - what is readily available, reasonably cheap if I am making 15 of them, how archival will they be? Then I had to think through what it would look like and how readily that would reproduce; and of course what skills would be needed to reproduce it and would I have them! I also wanted to make sure I didn't trick myself into doing a super-complicated binding or structure that would take me days to or weeks to finish 15 versions of.

It has been fascinating and I haven't had the time to learn all the things I wanted to learn on the way through, but I am nearly finished and for that I am grateful.  It is a fabulous project to be involved with and I am sure the final books from all the participants will be exciting, wonderful and different. I already have two in my hot little hands - stunning!

Here are some sneak peek shots of me at work...