Exhibition Activity

 For my exhibition later in the year in Scotland, I will be undertaking a weekly activity within the gallery space.

Because the exhibition explores ideas around home I have prepared four questions.

I am printing each question on a postcard sized page, and will have them in the gallery space for people to fill in, answer and complete.

I will then collect them all and stitch them into a book at the end of each week; then deliver the second week's questions, then the third and then the fourth. At the end of each week I will pop the now-stitched book back in the gallery space for visitors to flick through as they ponder the next week's question. By the end of the show there will be four hand-stitched books that have gathered people's thoughts about home.

So I have covered the covers - each week will be a different but complementary colour.

I have printed four Title pages, one for each book.

I have printed 4 slightly different colophons... saying where it was printed and who hand stitched it.

Because time in the studio has been very limited given life circumstances, I knew I wouldn't have time to print them all at the one time; and didn't want to waste ink, AND do a major clean up before I could return and print the next round, so I decided to hand ink each print. Its slower, but much less mess to clean up.

It always takes me a while to get into the groove again hand-inking, the consistency of ink, the coverage and the direction of rolling the ink on. As evidenced...

So I managed to get all the covers and the colophons (needing to stop and change out the week numbers each time), and 20 of the first question printed. There will be 40 pages printed for each book (I hope that is enough) so the top book here will be double the size once the extra 20 pages are added; and then bigger again because there will be stitching that keeps the pages a bit further apart than this. Chunky!

I have managed to set the second question and cut an extra 40 pages, so I will good to go whenever I next get to the studio.

You can just tell that we will need all of our luggage allowance to take everything over!