The Book of the Erinyes

I was lucky enough to be on a busi­ness trip to New York again last week, and I so had the oppor­tun­ity to visit the Cen­ter for Book Arts.

The Cen­ter is a great resource — they have a decent-sized Let­ter­press stu­dio with sev­eral proof presses, an equally well-resourced Bind­ery area, an exhib­i­tion space (illus­trated here in a photo from their web­site), and enough space left over for a small shop selling hand-bound chap­books, broad­sides, and exhib­i­tion catalogues.

But the main pur­pose of my visit was to see The Col­laged Accor­dion — an exhib­i­tion of Star Black’s large-scale accor­dion books that merge found texts & pho­to­graphs and ephemera.

Star’s  col­laged accor­dion books are intric­ately layered with a fine sense of tex­ture and the indi­vidual prop­er­ties of the found images and mater­i­als. They com­bine echoes of Joseph Cornell’s boxes with a sens­ib­il­ity for the subtler tex­tures and pos­sib­il­it­ies of paper.

I wish I could have spent a lot longer at the Cen­ter, but unfor­tu­nately I had to fly back to the UK that same day and had far too much to do.

If you get the chance to go to New York then the Cen­ter is def­in­itely worth visiting.

Cen­ter for Book Arts: main web­site | Blog | Face­book Page | Twit­ter | Flickr | You­Tube

Just a quick post to let you all know that I’ve been doing a few new lino prints and my first ever wood­cut for the Book of the Erinyes.

Click on the thumb­nails for lar­ger images and to leave comments:

As I’ve been work­ing on The Book of the Erinyes I’ve been try­ing to work out who it’s likely to appeal to.

The prob­lem is that it doesn’t fit com­fort­ably in any one area. It sits between art and craft, between book­bind­ing and book art, between main­stream and under­ground. It’s art made in the interstices.

Per­son­ally I find inter­sti­tial art to be more inter­est­ing, but as an artist it makes it very hard to find exist­ing mar­kets in which to pro­mote it.

When you’re try­ing to sell or pro­mote art­work (or indeed any­thing) the first thing you need to under­stand is your poten­tial audi­ence, because this usu­ally dic­tates how and where you mar­ket your art­work. There are many exist­ing routes you can use if your work fits neatly into a genre or dis­cip­line, but if your work floats between estab­lished defin­i­tions then it’s far more difficult.

This chain of thought led me to the Inter­sti­tial Arts Found­a­tion, which was foun­ded by a group of lit­er­ary, visual, musical, and per­form­ance artists for the pur­pose of devel­op­ing and pro­mot­ing inter­sti­tial art. There’s quite a lot to digest on their web­site, and I’ve only read a frac­tion of it so far, but I recom­mend it as a very inter­est­ing col­lec­tion of ideas.

How­ever I’m still left with the prob­lem of how to get The Book of the Erinyes “out there” — how to raise aware­ness of it so that I can sell some cop­ies of the lim­ited edi­tion hand­made book and of the vari­ous other related art­work (I’m plan­ning an unlim­ited paper­back print-on-demand ver­sion, and vari­ous lim­ited edi­tion post­cards, not to men­tion a free ebook version).

My per­sonal view (and, please, if you have a dif­fer­ent view, leave me a com­ment below) is that The Book of the Erinyes might appeal to two key audiences:

1. Book Arts/Bookbinding Arts — a more tra­di­tional arts audi­ence, albeit still in a grey area between the more fine-art area of Book Arts & Artist’s Books, and the more craft-orientated area of Book­bind­ing. And of course it also involves Let­ter­press print­ing, which is another sep­ar­ate area!
2. Arty & Weird — this is my work­ing name for a sub-cultural strand that seems to cross vari­ous bound­ar­ies, but can be broadly defined as those people who have an interest in art com­bined with one or more of the fol­low­ing interests:
   • graphic nov­els (par­tic­u­larly those by people like War­ren Ellis and Neil Gai­man, and the Hell­blazer series),
   • goth or altern­at­ive music sub-culture,
   • films by David Lynch or Terry Gilliam,
   • books by the likes of Neil Gai­man, China Miéville, and Jeff VanderMeer.

   I prom­ise I’ll try to think of a bet­ter name for this imperfectly-defined audi­ence  — if one already exists please let me know!

So, hav­ing worked out who I think might be inter­ested in The Book of the Erinyes I now have to find ways to reach them.

And this is where you, dear reader, come in. I’m soli­cit­ing sug­ges­tions and ideas as to how to reach my tar­get audi­ences.  Please leave me a com­ment below if you have any ideas.

EDIT: Thanks to the Inter­sti­tial Arts Found­a­tion for cit­ing & dis­cuss­ing this post.

I’m mak­ing very good pro­gress with the Let­ter­press part of the Book of the Erinyes at the moment — I’m man­aging to fit in 2 ses­sions of work at Brighton Inde­pend­ent Print­mak­ing each week, and I’m really on a roll.

Proof prints for chapters 6 and 7 below (click through to see lar­ger ver­sions & leave comments):

I thought I’d share a very short video I put together from some clips of me print­ing out a page of the Book of the Erinyes.

At some point in the not-too-distant future I’ll put together some­thing a bit bet­ter, but in the meantime:

Yes­ter­day I spent the day in Lon­don doing a whistle-stop tour of a few exhib­i­tions as back­ground research for the Book of the Erinyes.

Book­bind­ing at the V&A

First stop was the V&A in South Kens­ing­ton to see a small dis­play of Fine Bind­ings for the Man Booker Prize 2009 designed by the Soci­ety of Designer Bookbinders.

It’s only a small dis­play (6 books) but it’s well worth see­ing these bind­ings “in the flesh” as they’re great. The dis­play can be found in Room 74 (20^th Cen­tury sec­tion) of the V&A until 21^st March 2010, and admis­sion is free.

The bind­ing illus­trated here is by Rachel Ward-Sale. More inform­a­tion about all six bind­ings, their bind­ers, and the tech­niques & mater­i­als used can be found on the Soci­ety of Designer Book­bind­ers web­site.

Ctrl.Alt.Shift Unmasks Corruption

After the V&A I headed up to Soho to see Ctrl.Alt.Shift Unmasks Cor­rup­tion at the Laz­ar­ides Gal­lery in Greek Street — an exhib­i­tion of polit­ical comic book and graphic novel work by artists and writers includ­ing Dave McK­ean, Pat Mills, Peter Kuper, Janek Koza, Dan Gold­man, and pop cul­ture fig­ures Light­speed Cham­pion and V V Brown.

I’m par­tic­u­larly fond of Dave McKean’s artwork—especially the mag­ni­fi­cent Sand­man covers—so it was great to see some of his larger-scale col­lages close-up.  His art­work on dis­play was about the wide­spread cor­rup­tion sur­round­ing AIDS relief to vil­lages in China.

Ctrl.Alt.Shift Unmasks Cor­rup­tion is on until 28^th Novem­ber 2009 at the Laz­ar­ides Gal­lery, Greek Street, Lon­don.  Admis­sion is free.

One of the ele­ments of the hand­made Book of the Erinyes will be the use of marbled paper — some­times on the out­side cover, and some­times on the endpapers/inside cover.

As with all the parts of the book, I’m determ­ined to make it all myself, so I bought myself a copy of Tech­niques for Marbleiz­ing Paper by Gab­ri­ele Grünebaum.

First I made an alum solu­tion, using 6 tea­spoons of Alum in 450ml of water. The alum solu­tion works as a mord­ant — it fixes the marb­ling col­ours onto the sur­face of the paper. After bring­ing the solu­tion to the boil then let­ting it cool, I sponged it lib­er­ally onto a num­ber of sheets of paper then left them overnight to dry.

The next day I pre­pared the marb­ling size, using 6 tea­spoons of Car­ra­gheen Moss Powder dis­solved in 4 pints of hand-hot water, and left it to cool before start­ing some exper­i­ments, fol­low­ing the pat­terns in Gab­ri­ele Grünebaum’s book.

I decided to use Acrylic Inks — they don’t require any dis­pers­ing agent to be added for marb­ling, and the pig­ments are strong enough to retain a good strong col­our even when spread across the sur­face of the size.  The ones I bought come with pipettes in the lids of the bottles, which made the pro­cess even easier.

I was fairly pleased with the res­ults, but I’m obvi­ously going to have to get a lot more prac­tice to con­trol the process.

Non­pareil pattern:

Non­pareil pattern:

Wavy Combed:

Just got back from see­ing Romilly Sau­marez Smith: Book­bind­ings for Eileen Hogan at the V&A.
It’s a small exhib­i­tion, just out­side the National Art Lib­rary, but it’s def­in­itely worth a visit.

Obvi­ously I was on the look-out for inspir­a­tion for bind­ing the Book of the Erinyes, and Romilly Sau­marez Smith didn’t let me down.

Romilly Sau­marez Smith stud­ied book bind­ing and paper con­ser­va­tion at Cam­ber­well School of Art and Crafts and went on to become the first female for­warder at Zaehnsdorf’s Bind­ery (Zaehnsdorf’s Bind­ery was taken over by Shep­herds in 1998 and the bind­ery now trades under the single name of Sangor­ski & Sutcliffe.).  In the 1990s she began increas­ingly to use metal in her bind­ings, and gradu­ally moved to mak­ing jewellery.

One of the innov­at­ive mater­i­als Sau­marez Smith uses for bind­ing is pil­low tick­ing (the strong cot­ton fab­ric used to cover pil­lows and mat­tresses). The tick­ing is col­oured with multi-layered washes of leather dye, backed with Japan­ese paper and rubbed with beeswax.  She also uses dye and wax res­ist tech­niques to great effect.

The exhib­i­tion at the V&A is on until 2^nd August 2009.  More details on the V&A web­site.

I’m lucky to be on a work trip to New York at the moment, and this morning—my bodyc­lock still work­ing on UK time, and the rain pour­ing down—I man­aged to grab some time to visit the Mor­gan Lib­rary and Museum on Madison Avenue, not far from my hotel.

The Mor­gan began as the private lib­rary of fin­an­cier Pier­pont Mor­gan hous­ing his col­lec­tion of illu­min­ated, lit­er­ary, and his­tor­ical manu­scripts, early prin­ted books, and old mas­ter draw­ings and prints.

The main focus of my visit to this insti­tu­tion was to see—first-hand—a Guten­berg Bible (the Lib­rary owns three of them!) prin­ted in 1455 by Johannes Guten­berg, the inventor of the print­ing press and mov­able type.

The visit was a fant­astic mine of inspir­a­tion, from the won­der­ful lib­rary itself (illus­trated here — photo by mach­bel, found on Flickr, licensed under Cre­at­ive Com­mons, used with thanks), to the vast array of old books (includ­ing some great Books of Hours), the Guten­berg Bible itself, and a fant­astic col­lec­tion of art­work encom­passing per­sonal favour­ites such as Joseph Cor­nell, Egon Schiele, and Jim Dine, as well as pre­par­at­ory sketches and draw­ings by old masters.

I left the gal­ler­ies and went to the Lib­rary shop feel­ing very pleas­antly over­whelmed, my head over­flow­ing with ideas and inspir­a­tion for the Book of the Erinyes.

In the shop, in addi­tion to a couple of post­cards, I bought a copy of Mini­ature Books: 4,000 Years of Tiny Treas­ures — a won­der­ful, richly illus­trated, book explor­ing the world of books that are less than 3 inches high.

I don’t actu­ally have a huge interest in mini­ature books, but the bind­ings illus­trated in this book are won­der­ful — I think the cre­at­ors decided that they could have more fun with small books.

They range from tra­di­tional leather bind­ings to bind­ings made of mother-of-pearl (pop­u­lar as a deluxe bind­ing in the 19^th cen­tury), gold-thread on silk, tor­toise­shell, cop­per, vel­vet, gold, sil­ver fili­gree, palekh lac­quer (a Rus­sian folk craft), polycar­bon­ate, and enamel. Some are plain, oth­ers gilt-tooled, embed­ded with emer­alds, amethysts or pearls, embossed, embroidered, engraved, or dec­or­ated with tiny enamel portraits.

The wealth of cre­ativ­ity dis­played in this book is amaz­ing, and will cer­tainly prove invalu­able as inspir­a­tion for bind­ing the Book of the Erinyes.

A couple of weeks ago I did the first set of “offi­cial” pho­to­graphs with Dawn (who is mod­el­ling in the role of Tisiphone).

Des­pite some prob­lems with my cam­era (serves me right for being lazy and rely­ing on the auto-focus when I was shoot­ing in low light!) I man­aged to get some great pho­tos, which I’m slowly and painstak­ingly main­pu­lat­ing now.

I thought I’d share them:

(more on the Erinyes art­work page)