The story of Conversations

Having shared the get-together of our two books on Wednesday, I thought I'd take the time to show you through my book "Conversations".

These prints were never made to be seen together and I worried, no doubt as Susan did, about how to tell a cohesive story; how to make them seem as if they belonged in the same book.

I spent time pairing them up and finding ones which I felt spoke to each other, and could begin a conversation.

Then I had to work out how to present them, how to link them somehow to stop them looking they were just two prints stuck next to each other.  I know how important words are to me, and this notion just gets regularly re-enforced. It is natural for me to turn to words when trying to find a way through an artistic or design dilemma.

I am also quite regular and structured in my work - I am not a free-flowing organic shape kind of gal. I wondered about writing haiku that drifted across the pages, I wondered about words just dropped into pages…in the end I chose to write a few words about different conversations in a square, centred on the opposite page to the prints.

Detail of a conversation...

One of the warmer pages...

Print and embossing detail…

Each of the written conversations reflect a conversation type I have with friends or family, and which for me could be linked somehow to the imagery.

The end result, was too much structure even for me; staid, a bit sterile, a bit blocky.

I wanted to link the pages, to bring the words and the prints together as if they were conversing, to make them seem joined and connected.  I thought about marks, I thought about stitching and in the end I just chopped some squares and rectangles into embossing plates and hand embossed them in a free-flowing manner across the two pages, linking the imagery and the words. Ahh, now we're talking!

Some more pages…

Having done the pages, the next thing to sort was the cover - how much of the inside to reflect? More embossing? Prints? Free-flowing or structured? 

This is a detail of the cover - wee scraps of prints, both Susan's and mine. These are the same size as the embossed shapes inside the book; yet are structured into a square the same size as the calligraphy block. Somehow this holds...

The quiet 'title' page introduces the conversation, without actually stating a conversation…

So finally, I had a look I was happy with - simple, uncluttered, yet gently conversing across the pages...