The Book of the Erinyes

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.

One of the things I’ve star­ted con­sid­er­ing is how to bind the 30 to 50 cop­ies of the Book of the Erinyes.

I decided right from the start that they’d all be indi­vidu­ally hand-bound and I would try dif­fer­ent bind­ing mater­i­als across the lim­ited edition.

I’ve been on hol­i­day on the Greek island of Naxos for the past couple of weeks and, while tour­ing the souvenir shops I spot­ted some sketch books/journals for sale that were bound with dried vine leaves.

This seemed like a great idea to steal — espe­cially for a Greek sub­ject like the Erinyes.  So I quickly col­lec­ted and pressed a dozen vine leaves and brought them back with me.  I like the idea of some of the cop­ies of the Book of the Erinyes being bound in dried Vine Leaves—a par­tic­u­larly Greek motif—is par­tic­u­larly appeal­ing, espe­cially since the vine leaves were spe­cially col­lec­ted on a Greek island by the artist (no expense is spared scour­ing the world for mater­i­als for my art!).