This book has been sitting on my shelf for a while. Nicola gave it to me, the book wasn’t interesting enough to read, and it was a pleasant reading size and shape.
I worked on it for more than a month, because i was travelling a lot.
When i pulled it out to work on in Adelaide while at the Fringe Festival I found it quite alienating – the book kept wanting to close itself.
I had taken with me a few plastic bags and envelopes full of the ephemera I was going to do “something” with – stamps feature quite a lot.
Over the period of working with the book I worked out that I could of course use fold back clips to open up the pages, and you’ll see i photographed each page by anchoring them with rocks.
I took out more than half of the book, just ripped out the pages, and towards the end i used my Gansai Tambi watercolour paints along with some colourless wax crayons to make patchwork quilts etc on the pages I didn’t want to remove (because they had some collage on the other side).
Unlike my usual altered books I didn’t cut out any see-through bits (why not? just didn’t).
What I learnt:
- Altering a book is much easier if it will sit flat on the table (most of the ones I’ve done to date have done this)
- Stamps are hard for me to work with, but not impossible.
Here is the video
