What happened along the way to "on joy -"

 I really am pleased with how this book worked out as I was far from convinced that it would actually get somewhere.

To begin. 

I had thought that Barry and I could both do with a little nudge along creatively - trying to find ways to explore the letterpress beyond our initial thoughts and thinking.  We spoke about doing a kindred project, using the Artist Book Ideation cards I had purchased from Flying Fish Press many moons ago.

So at the end of June, we sat and selected our cards together, and these were the guides:

COLOUR: Black and White 

PAPER: Transparent and translucent 

TEXT: Collaborate with a poet/writer 

STRUCTURE: Unbound 

IMAGE: Found image 

TECHNIQUE: Mixed media 

LAYOUT: Based on a grid 

ADJECTIVES: Fragmented or mosaic Mysterious or coded Surreal Allegorical Graphic

I really like this process for busting out of my own thinking.  One of the great gifts of this project was it allowed, encouraged, forced, me to look at my translucent papers and work out how to use them.  I have had some of them for so many years, yet have never really put them to too much use and here was a real opportunity.

The collaboration around text was also a good thing to try to work on.  We both approached our friend Mary Jane Dodd to see if we could work with some of the words from her book "Offerings", and she generously and kindly said yes.

I selected only the opening few words from the full work "on joy -" but they resonate with the times.

The rest of the work is beautiful and can be read here...

So I wanted to work with loose unbound pages, in a grid, that when layered together could create a whole. I wanted to work with the notion of shattering into pieces and used a found image of broken glass. I wanted to use thread.

And so it came about that I traced the image onto a beautiful Japanese paper (sekishu kozogami mare) and then cut it into 16 pieces.  I had four pages of tengucho (18gsm), and placed 4 squares on each page. and then stitched the lightest tengucho paper (4gsm) over the top in a 4cm grid. The squares were held by the stitching together of the paper. Leaving those threads dangling as I do.

A reminder of just delicate that 4gsm tengucho paper really is...

See here and here for some earlier process posts.

I tested printing onto the 18gsm tengucho and it was divine.  And then I thought about the way I had proofed it to check alignment and realised that if I printed three times (without re-inking) and moved the paper a tiny bit each time I would get the echoes of the words. I love those unexpected moments that truly make magic of a piece.

And then it was done.

And it feels special.