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Make graceful and lasting change

Now is a ship


Cindy Tonkin - July 17, 2021

This is a long piece – I made more than 50 pages worth of decoration.

It’s one of a series working with the e.e.cummings now is a ship. Visit the e.e.cummings theme page to find the others.

There are 4 sections (loosely corresponding to increasing stages of sleep).

  • laser printed with coloured in bits, then water sprayed to dull the colours of the water colour
  • hand lettered using a cricut-made stencil and water colour pens (and some water)
  • cricut-cut stencil / words cut out (using both positive and negative space)
  • gibberish words from the cut outs (signalling the descent into sleep)

There are more than 48 pages, each is bound individually – the paper was some greeting card-sized stationery I bought to make cards years ago, and now they are the pages in a book – but the card is quite thick, so each signature is only one page. I bound it with my usual concertina stitch-free binding, and I in fact had to do that twice because I hadn’t thought through the need for 48 little sticks to keep the binding together.

I have spoken before about how each work has the film or show anchored inside it. This one has a movie about a woman who was killed just when she and her husband had just gotten together; The Good Doctor’s first few eps, and a couple of other things.

it’s a lockdown, so I have time.

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