Furthering the conversations

 I have enjoyed my work around Conversations with Women Friends a lot.  It keeps rolling around in my head in different ways, as I  think of new and differing expressions for it.

I keep adding new conversations.

Here is my book and notes from our Biblio sessions at the Store at Bettyhill our nearby village. We head over on Tuesdays and Thursdays (the same pattern we have in Maleny) and have breakfast and coffee and sit quietly writing, reading, pondering our art. One difference is that breakfast in Maleny starts at 7am; here we begin at 9am.

A couple of new ones took form without needing to edit or re-write. They simply appeared. Others have plenty of gaps and strike throughs and reorganising marks! Also notes to self to remind me that I am doing the writing work in this book; and the thoughts about what to do with the words are over in my Art Journal number 12.

In a weird turn of events, having written more, I set about reducing the first ten to a single word each.  All of this thinking happened over in AJ12. Grin.

I thought of another expression, which was to work with the single word, and then possibly two images to support it, or to create a sense of it. I daresay this will not be an easy task in terms of finding photographs, doing the layout and printing etc etc, but my first challenge was to see if I could make a book with the fold outs I was imagining.

So I set to work with some sheets of used A4 paper. Along the way I changed the working title from short to brief conversations.

I liked the notion of a wrapper to enclose and envelope them. With a band apparently, in case I forget.

I mentioned it won't be easy to get the layout right (for the likes of me) and sure enough here I have added more text on the first unfold of the wrapper. We shall see down the track if any of this becomes possible!

I have determined it will need to be a coptic bound book; with separate hard covers. I think. I am not a fan of the accordion format too much, which would have offered another way of reading this book, but I will test it this way first.

Along the side view the different sections to rebound. Pondering five versus ten of the first conversations. Five is more intimate; ten has more gravitas. Ten also has a sense of completeness given the first round has ten conversations. Maybe this becomes volume I?

How I envisage (at this stage) one of the brief conversations looking. The single word appears as you turn a page; then you unfurl the page to the right and two images appear.

The first conversation reads:

caring for

caring about

chicken soup

So I have selected the main word for me from the conversation which is caring. I now need to go through each of the conversations, selecting their key word and then listing thoughts about possible images that might support or represent the word/conversation. 

My first instinct here is to have a photo of a bowl of steaming soup on the right hand and a photo of one hand holding another on the left. Another image could be the knocker on a door and then the soup. I can see I could spend a lot of time working my way through this, but I kind of like the idea and think it has value.

Of course it could mean trawling through my existing images for hours looking for possible photos; or it might mean taking specific photos with purpose. In amongst all of this is the fun! I have a project to keep in mind as I do things.