Rusting away

I have found myself in the studio over the past few days planning for this, preparing for that. My book "The Nurses", which was in Belgium, is on its way home, and will be heading to another exhibition in a month or so. In between, another gallery has asked if they can show it, but it is at the exact same time that the next gallery has it, so they asked "could you do us another one?".  Hmmm well, maybe I could do another one like it...

So in order to begin I have pulled out the bibs and bobs that went into the last one, the old paper, the embossing and de-bossing plates for the barbed wire, but I just didn't have any of the grey, khaki rusted brown braille paper left for the hand-stitched peace inserts.

I scrambled around and found I still had 7 sheets of the brown braille paper, and thought, well it must be rusted!

On Friday I made up a solution and had my trays ready, and from there I just rusted everything in sight it seemed.

The brown braille paper got done.

Then some white braille paper.

Then I found some white pages that had been cut and were sitting around waiting for something to happen - and so they got rusted too.

I remembered I had cut up heaps of grey Canson for a book workshop that never got used, and out it came as well for rusting - some portrait, some landscape.

And as I wandered about looking for ready-made-for-rusting materials I came across some luggage tags, and thought why not?

The studio floor was covered in wet and rusting paper for about two days.

Sunday, I collected and collated and pressed and now it is all stacked waiting to be the inspiration for something else.

And after all of that,  the good news is I have the paper ready for "The Nurses v.2"!