Reconstructed book.

Reconstructed

In the library at University College for the Creative Arts there is a really interesting display of reconstructed books which have been made by the Foundation students. I think the difference from ‘altered’ books is this seems to be mainly about restructuring the book in some way, rather than decorating or painting. Some of you may know more about this than I do. We did a project where we took in an object which had some meaning to us and then were asked to take it apart and reconstruct it in a meaningful way. I took photos as I didn’t really want to cut up clothing or furniture. Back to the books; I really liked the tactile look of them and had to have a go. I bought my paperback from a charity shop, but it was still a bit hard to start folding the pages. This is my first effort, with some thread and wax added.

Circles

One of the ideas I had for the Space project was to work on the idea of a circle, a shape ‘which separates the space it surrounds from the space surrounding it’. I took some photos of round objects and played around with printing from bottle caps and lids for a while but that’s as far as I got. I can recommend Koh-I-Nor water based dyes which are brilliant colours and work well on paper when discharged with bleach. I have also sprinkled salt in places. In the UK I got a small palette of them from Art Van Go.

I used discharge paste to try to replicate the result on procion dyed fabric.

I have also been playing around with the settings on my camera which I have not used before; Sepia, Vivid Colours and trying to get less depth of field. As you can see this is a cotton reel which I used in my printing and discharging experiments.