abc archive

Bound

2012-01-26T05:33:00.001-08:00

Debra Eck

Phil Legard & Layla Smith

Stevie Ronnie & Susannah Pickering

Kate Desforges

Jane Chinea

Aine Scannell

Emily Towler

Louise Tett
I have looked at the theme of 'bound' from an emotional point of view, from the fact that our bonds to others are not necessarily tangible and that a spoken vow or promise can bind us to another. These bindings radiate through families attaching people that may not even have met.

: by love and tears is an anthology of found poems relating to family bonds. Each poem has been cut into thin shards and hand spun with fleece. The fleece fibers bind with the paper to form yarn which has then been rolled into tiny individual balls, varying in size depending on the length of the poem. A copy of the first line of each poem is attached with a pin, giving a glimpse of the text; but the cosy domesticity of the wound balls conceals the significant events such as birth, death and marriage that knit a family together. There is an accompanying paper and muslin book which lists the poems.

Wendy Williams

I find paper a useful medium that can manipulated to bridge gaps between its delicacy and its strength.

Combining the use of paper with wood, creates layers, stacked and overlaid like documentaries waiting to be unlocked. The work however, does not open like a book, the pages are bolted down or have some other restriction, so the viewer is forced to stop and think before opening them.

Jane Kenington

Amy Strike

Jean McEwan & Maria Cobo

Larna Campbell

Nicola Hafter-Smith

Darren Bryant

Jon Eland

Hilly Fletcher

Nathaniel Chang

Jan Millington

Heather Matthew

Glann Malkin

Linda Ingham

Janet Allsebrook

Roger Boygott

Home from Home

2011-02-06T09:13:00.001-08:00

153 Woodhouse Lane

11th - 18th March 2011
Curated by Louise Atkinson
Image by Jacob Schuhle-Lewis

With ideas ranging from the domestic to displacement, over 80 artists from 7 different countries have contributed to this years Artist Book Collective exhibition around the theme of Home. 153 Woodhouse Lane is the setting for Home from Home, to be shown alongside the 14th Leeds International Artist Book Fair. As a spacious Victorian terrace situated over three floors, it provides the perfect backdrop for this site-specific exhibition.

Artists responded to the brief through exploring and expanding on the book as a time-based medium, whilst incorporating the notion of the Everyday. Traditional book works as well as sculptural objects, text, narrative, video, furniture, audio and performance are represented throughout the show.

The concept of Home evokes various associations, including our experience of domestic spaces in relation to their designated public/private status, as well as the collection and curation of personal possessions within those spaces. Often our sense of self and security is linked to feeling ‘at home’, insinuating that this sensation is not always related to a particular place or building.

At first glance, Home from Home gives an impression of family, refuge and sanctuary, but upon closer inspection, it also begins to uncover associated feelings of anxiety and uncertainty relating to superstition, illness and transience.

Shaheen Ahmed
Muji-Wuji, Subverted Catalogue, 2011
Shaheen Ahmed's strangely beguiling bookwork combines child play, dervish ritual and retail therapy. In the darkest black ink, bold Arabic numerals and lettering sweep across the pages of high street store catalogues. As we turn the heavily treated pages we discover a soul at times struggling with then embracing the visual onslaught of consumer culture. A repetitive dialogue opens up on the pages of the Argos, Muji and IKEA books, using Japanese sumi ink her black brush stokes seem anxious to nullify the overload of multicoloured consumable objects so beautifully shot and composed on the glossy pages. This is a brave and bold journey, unrehearsed, where we glimpse a child playing, making patterns and finding a hidden symmetry in the compositions, only suddenly to awake from the anaesthesia and questions the point of all this stuff, what the hell is it for? And why do I want it so badly? Painful and beautiful all at once.

Anne Akers
Coffee, Photograph, 2010
The whiff of coffee from the kitchen, the clatter of cups in the lounge, the sound of slurping and stirring as coffee punctuates elements of daily life. I love coffee and wherever I go, I find my coffee has a story to tell, whether it’s the setting, my fellow-drinkers, the occasion or just the glorious coffee taste. I photograph coffee, usually with the phone on my camera, send it via message to friends kind of like a coffee postcard, blog about it and bring the photos together into a mosaic coffee collection.

Melanie Alexandrou
Magpie Thunder Bureau, Mixed Media Installation, 2009 - 2011
The Magpie Thunder Bureau is a feast for the eyes, a real magpie’s nest! An assortment of books, stationery, and little treasures, both found and handmade, all compartmentalised and labelled in the almost obsessive way that characterises a bureauphile. My work focuses on animalia (most specifically birds) as a way of exploring and celebrating a return to a more organic aesthetic, using materials and methods that are craft-based together with more ‘traditional’ disciplines such as printmaking, painting, and illustration. Participation in postal art networks enables a continued dialogue with other artists and makers, independent from the constraints of clinical, mainstream galleries and invites the viewer to get involved.

Stacey Allen and Katherine Johnson
Make Do and Mend, Performance, 2011
Stacey Allen and Katherine Johnson work collaboratively. Two different practices are united through a shared sense of humour and view on the world. The audience are invited to destroy maps of Britain as the performers work in a futile attempt to put them back to normal showing a literal cycle of damage and repair. Make do and Mend is a piece based on the modern idea of "Broken Britain" and how the ever-mounting problems in society are never really fixed but smoothed over the problems becoming inherent in our culture. The performers go about their thankless frenzied task dressed as land girls harking back to wartime community spirit while their actions reflect more desperate times.

Karen Babayan
Packing, DVD, 2011
A female figure is kneeling on a Persian carpet, packing and unpacking a suitcase. The action is repetitive and mundane, the packer indecisive and in turns, agitated and impatient, controlled and decisive. Intended to evoke the universal experience of migration, the work explores opposing emotions of uncertainty, fear, guilt, excitement, anticipation and longing.

With an art practice strongly rooted in the exploratory and multidisciplinary, I am exploring themes of migration, displacement and diaspora. Performative works, Artist's Books and fictional narrative are based on personal experience and collected accounts of loss and displacement from members of the Armenian community from Iran, now living in the West as a result of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Lorna Barrowclough
Bourgeois Basics, Tapestry & Found Objects, 2009
Currently working predominantly with sculpture, found objects and craft based processes my work is inclusive and experimental. Whilst there is a respect for the traditions of the techniques, I try to offer a refreshing open approach to the materials and methods that might be utilised.

A production of work has followed that explores the method in which we gather, decipher and adopt certain objects onto our lives. I am interested in the idea that comfort is found in certain objects; a need to possess certain items can entertain the idea that they can personify ourselves to an extent that improvement of ones life can occur purely by owning these objects.

Lorain Behrens
Altered Almanac, Found Book Sculptures, 2011
Old books on a shelf; each looks like an ordinary book from the outside but open them up and discover a whole new world. I enjoy working with books, tearing, painting, gluing and generally destroying them to create a new work of art. My other art interests include polymer clay, collage, and multimedia. www.uniquearts.co.uk

Harriet Bevan
Vandalised With Love, Found Book Collage, 2010
Old books are a living entity, once cherished but now discarded, or ejected from circulation and left to rot. I reclaim and re-imagine them, carefully deconstructing and vandalising until they become something different; reborn, with new truths and patterns emerging. I set myself rules and always honour the original pagination, never cracking the spine or interfering with its central nervous system.

Vandalised with Love is a systematic collage working within the pagination of a 1930s photography book, discarded from a library which would once have charged a hefty fine and/or a prison sentence for its 'mutilation'.

Inheritance was a different kind of project. I found my Grandfather's 1960s Zenit camera in the cupboard. It already had a film in it, which he started sixteen years ago. I hastily used it up, peering anxiously through his lens. The prints came out strangely warped due to the aged film so there is a sense of continuity in the results. It struck me that this passing on of a small image-capturing project was a more meaningful inheritance than any I could have hoped for.

Linda Bevan
Wrapped & Unwrapped, Brown Paper and Other Materials, 2011

Linda Bevan is a performance-based artist focusing on live art experiments as formal exercises to be explored sculpturally and as markers for the passing of time. Her art practice has included using everyday materials as perpetual props to make art that exists as traces of past happenings but also future experiments. Currently she is exploring archival documentation through the wrapping up of all her home possessions.

Krijnie Beyen
Gobs, Mixed Media, 2011
Gobs (bread) is the result of an exchange between artists from Morocco and the Netherlands. Bread is a basic and general food, prepared after different and traditional recipes. On top of the bread I put the map of the Medina of the Morrocan town Fes. The place where we met, the bread that we ate.

Julia Bickerstaff
Silent Resolution, Neon & Glass, 2010
Julia has a fascination with light and the perception of its origins of everyday life. Silent Resolution demonstrates the ideal within a house hold of where light/electricity comes from and that it is a commodity to be grateful for, respect and not take for granted. This is self evident from the skills needed to make the piece. Look at found objects they represent discarded insight into people’s possessions. Light reading burns through the gathering of information. This knowledge gathered for many reasons from enjoyment to need. The result of the source is the same, a quest for enlightenment.

Stephanie Black
The Unsung Telephone, Drawing, Collage & Mixed Media, 2011
My current practice is concerned with process, with the unexpected twists and turns that making throws up informing the direction of projects. The Unsung Telephone comes from a larger body of work that seeks to form a loose narrative using this method, and at this stage comprises drawings, collage, three-dimensional pieces and some slightly telling detritus found in the attic of a house. The project is intended to extend my illustration skills into three-dimensional space, and this in turn will inform the book version that results from installing the work.

Jade Blood
Plate Rack, Drawings on Found Plates, 2010
I make installation work exploring themes such as 'the everyday' and 'culture' (whatever that means). I have a strong DIY ethic and like to use found objects within my work, or inexpensive objects picked up at car-boot sales. I like to re-use the objects and give them a new purpose. The objects usually remind me of playing in my grandma's house (way too giddy) surrounded by ornaments and old curiosities. I love creating installations- I feel like a kid making a den.

Sarah Bodman
Flowers in Hotel Rooms Vol IV, Digital Print, 2009
The series is a set of journals, documenting my actions and those of characters in novels, or writers whose work I am reading when I stay in hotel rooms. Working in Poland, near the home of the writer and artist Radoslaw Nowakowski in Dabrowa Dolna, a tiny hamlet, I sit outside at dusk with dogs barking (reading Ethan Frome) and I notice the garlic that has been nailed up for protection outside the front door by the wonderful B&B owner. Elsewhere, I’m reading The Shining by Stephen King, typing “all work and no play” on a portable plastic typewriter.

Alice Bradshaw
Print 13, Photographic Print, 2008
Alice Bradshaw works with a wide range of media and processes involving the manipulation of everyday objects and materials. Mass-produced, anonymous objects are often rendered dysfunctional caricatures of themselves, addressing concepts of purpose and futility. Alice creates or accentuates subtleties, blurring distinctions between the absurd and the mundane.

Kate Burt
All the Birds of Lancashire, Hand Drawn and Cut Book, 2010
Through the medium of artist books, I explore the nature of human relationships with each other, their environments and the lives they lead. Personal and playful, I hope to interact with the audience by means of ‘space’; space within the physicality of the book, space within the imagination of the viewer and the literal space referred to within the content.

Larna Campbell
Fragility, Paper, Letterpress & Thread, 2011
Larna Campbell is a visual artist who makes work in response to her experience of the world around her. Finding inspiration in the moment and in the everyday as well as in the extraordinary, Larna develops artwork out of a process of research, dialogue, exploration and making. Current research includes exploring text and representations of emotive narratives through a series of performance and print based works.

Shaeron Caton-Rose
Terrydrops, Linocut and Letterpress Book with Soundtrack, 2009
EverAfter looks at the disparity between fairytale and reality, but also the way in which fairytale can explain reality to us. The piece consists of three artist’s books, each telling a different fairytale written by the artist and based on ‘real life’ stories told to her by three women. The women were interviewed and the recording of their life stories accompany the books as a background soundtrack. Terrydrops, the first book, tells a story of fear associated with the home and family. In it, the female protagonist is tricked, abused and then blamed for her apparent complicity in this process.

Anwyl Cooper-Willis
Postcards Home, Card, Metal & Thread, 2011
Postcards sent home from tourist destinations; pictures which attempt to capture the spirit of a place but can leave so much unsaid. Old postcards with their trite seeming messages and prosaic images have pathos; their communication no longer between individuals but over time. Messages from the past.

Amelia Crouch
Fences I and II, Video, 2006
Fences I and II and Worth (all will be well) are both about aspiration and limitation. Providing a meditation upon everyday circumstances they are simultaneously at home with and uneasy about the mundane obsessions with which we may fill our lives.

My work frequently combines words and images and uses quotation from existing sources. It attempts to tap into what might be called a 'collective cultural imagery' – the associations and mental images that people carry with them already, that they have absorbed from the world around them sometimes unconsciously.

Julie Dodd
Family Album, Mixed Media, 2011

My practice consists of print, installation work and bookmaking. ‘Family Album’ is a collection of altered photographs of my relatives and is about the stories I’ve been told over the years. I’m not sure what is accurate and what has been elaborated on, but that doesn’t matter, it’s about what the photographs mean to me. ‘Building Blocks of Life’ has been created using my old sketchbooks, photo albums, diaries, textbooks and scrap books containing photographs, cards and other snippets that have been part of my life. For more info visit www.juliedodd.co.uk

Manya Donaque
Sobrepieles, Mixed Media, 2000
I am a multimedia artist very interested in issues surrounding life and death... I often use found materials in my work, things that have being discarded, rejected, displaced...I like playing with the idea of giving a new life to objects by transforming, re- shaping, manipulating them to create new meanings... books, objects are very much a reflection of whom we are and as long as we are surrounded by ‘our objects’ I think we can say we are at home, regardless of where we come from...

Inbal Drue
Where I End and You Begin, Letraset on Tile, 2011
Fragments of dialogues by one character. The absence of the other. Tiles as a domestic material but also as a permanent post it note – a way of communication indoors. When only one side is being written, you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.

Debra Eck
Babble: The Sum of all Fears, Paper, 2011
Part of a new series inspired by the refuse of modern life, each card, from partial decks headed for the rubbish, is a specific fear related to a creative life created by the artist. Put together they are a barrier, but when shared with the viewer who is invited to take away any card which particularly 'speaks' to them, it forms instead a new means of connection & communication.

Jon Eland and Phil Kirby
The Tent that Jon Made, Photo Book, 2011
This storybook dares you into a world far from nice, a place where creatures are unfriendly, unhelpful, unkind. What you will see is not easy on the soul it’ll pray on your mind and take a heavy toll. And, as reward, the garish and the vile is all you’ll have found. But these are the things you’re sure to observe in the land inside the tent that Jon made.

For more, including a narrated video, event information, back-story and subsequent material visit http://strawbl.eu/tent

Francis Elliott
Garden, Oil on Steel wrapped in Acrylic, 2009
Red and yellow and pink and green, Purple and orange and blue

Cath Fairgrieve
Ceramic Poems, Artist Book, 2010
Ceramic Poems was inspired by ceramic objects from the Aberystwyth University Collection. Images of hands interact with the vessels to find new functions for historical artefacts: the hands represent 3 generations of my family - parents, daughter, partner. By collaging past and present I attempt to better understand self. ‘Family’ is imbued with the significance of momento mori whilst the fragmentation of Victorian texts suggests potential for guiding human values.

DIY was made in response to a leaflet advertising Nervine Remedy as a cure for various ailments. Text from the leaflet is juxtaposed with images of painting and decorating the home. As the reader turns pages the neglected home becomes a place for relaxation and comfort: it is a metaphor for family-life, which requires constant care to sustain wellbeing.

Bernard Fairhurst
Still Life, Video, 2010
The challenge is to take the commonplace and make it visually interesting, engaging and to elicit a sense of emotion and wonderment. In my work I use assemblages of multiple or related images to focus attention, resulting in two works for Home from Home. Still Life: A contemporary still-life, that evokes seventeenth century Dutch interiors and records a short period in December 2010 after 34 years of illness and Moving: An archival work cataloguing the traces left after a house move.

Emma Fotherby
Book Of Emotions: Outside, Monoprint in Japanese Bound Book, 2011
A mono-print rose wallpaper installation featuring ashes from my home fire reflecting on a lonely childhood secretly drawing on walls and then rubbing it out afterwards, drawing angry doodles instead of going to sleep, wanting mess instead of neatness, neatness instead of mess. The two books that accompany the installation are alternative Wallpaper sample books of hand drawn mono-prints reflecting past emotions felt at home.

Jonathan Gann
Piggy, Artist Book, 2010
The mind is a dark place, problematic and unforgiving at times. It is like an endless riddle, a joke told without a final line. I want to push things forward, to change minds… starting with mine.

Gina Gordon
Wash, Wax, Lint & Hair, 2010
Gina Gordon is an interdisciplinary artist who collects and utilises the ‘left-overs’ of everyday life. The wax bricks enclose the lint and hair from her family wash over a period of one year.

Hazel Grainger
Ticket Book, Reused Tickets and Timetables with Rubber Stamp Printing, 2011
A set of folded books made from train tickets from the 1960's and pieces of contemporary timetables, with rubber stamp printing. The sculptural forms and patterns evoke the feelings of a train journey, the frustrations, the changes, the waiting and late running. The books maintain the aesthetic and tactile qualities of the original tickets. They are displayed as everyday familiar objects, put to one side in the home but not yet discarded.

Nikki Hafter
Views of Egypt and the Desert, Film, 2011I’m interested in found objects and the lost stories they might carry with them. My recent work has explored how we might recover these histories or invent new ones, opening up imaginary nostalgias or instigating physical transformations. My film works have been made using found 8mm footage that was made by my grandparents. While they show physical locations abroad, for me they represent ideas of family, history, memory and nostalgia which are very much tied to a concept of 'home' as the locus of family experience rather than any physical space, and which has allowed them to gain associative meaning as objects in themselves rather than as representations.

Terry Hammill
Umbrella Book, A5 Prints, 2011

The Umbrella Book takes as its motif the international symbol used on boxes and packages - 'Protect Against Water'. The symbol has been turned upside down and the image has triggered off word associations and phrases in my mind such as the one illustrated here - 'Walking on water'. Blank pages (with image but no text) will be provided and viewers are invited to add their own associative titles which could then become part of the book.

Claire Harbottle
Lilla’s Birthing, Digital Film, 2010
While there are various representations of women in labour, most focus attention on the event of the child’s birth, not the woman’s birthing process, often objectifying her in favour of the subjectivity of the newborn. Lilla’s Birthing seeks re-establish the birthing woman as empowered within her own labouring, not victim of it. Through a normalised woman centred portrayal of birthing, the widespread misrepresentation of labouring women and their bodies is undermined. Portrait of a Labour works with and against Lilla’s Birthing, the intimacy of the book format allowing the viewer to examine that which the film denies: representations of her, which the film references (you see these shots being taken) but refuses.

Rose Harries
Les Choses A-Z, Ink, Pencil, Crayon, Pen, 2011I am an illustrator based in Wakefield at Westgate Studios. Above all I love line and I spend most of my time drawing, usually in dip pen and ink, or in pencil. I also create and bind books, usually after obsessively researching something that has grabbed my interest; recently this has been Victorian advertising and ephemera, manual labour and poverty.

I made these in response to a French A-z poster which I have on my wall at home; they remind me so much of being younger. The adverts are things that people were encouraged to bring into their homes; the other poster is of the things I have hoarded around my flat and have stopped noticing a lot of the time but I chose to bring into my home at some point.

Debi Holbrook
Untitled (Book), Found Book/Wire, 2011
'Is there something there amongst the dust that could bring you back' Eliza Marieanna

The lure of the abandoned object is hard for me to ignore, curiosity and empathy compel me to question its story and reason for discard. My work transposes the human condition with inanimate and often domestic, found objects, where distinction becomes blurred between autobiographical memory, imagination and evidence.

Gillian Holt
Broken and Air Fire, Porcelain Books, 2010
Time, memory, history, loss and memorial are the themes of this work. My father’s WW2 pilot’s log book and photograph albums upon his death in 2005 reawakened my interest in my family’s history in particular and social history in general, especially the industrial revolution, the Victorian age and the two world wars. My father served in the Fleet Air Arm. Generations of his ancestors were dyers at Hunsworth Mill. Trade, recipe and pattern books of one of these ancestors are held in the Special Collection of Leeds University Library. The dyeing industry inspired the shapes of my bottles and jars.

Shelley Hughes
When I Was Just a Little Girl, Acrylic & Pencil on Wallpaper, 2011
Born in Scarborough in 1984, grew up in North Yorkshire, studied in Lancashire, I moved to Sheffield in 2006 and became involved in the community arts scene, which is now integral to my practice, I set up shop at Portland Works in the summer of 2010. I am a painter, mostly. I like to paint people. I make little drawings and big paintings. I do commissions, exhibitions and workshops.

Ben Johnson
Divination, Mixed Media, 2011
It’s common knowledge that the Victorians had a fascination with the Ouija board and much like us; their own fate in relation to death and the afterlife. The board is best used with up to four people, face to face, preferably with knees touching. Lightly touch the planchette, moving it in a circular motion initially and keep the first question simple. The session will end when the planchette is placed over ‘goodbye.’ If you’re personally not a believer, then what will the Ouija board tell you about what may be lurking within your own subconscious or undesirable side? Please write down (truthfully) in the notebook provided what the board says during the session.

Katherine Johnson
Knitted Pieces, Wool & Knitting Needles, 2009
My work sits somewhere between fine art and craft, as the methods I use often stem from craft, such as textiles, and paper art, but the objects I create and the ways in which I choose to show them puts them into a fine art context. I am intrigued by the way an object can be perceived depending upon the methods of its production, and where it is experienced. By using craft methods in their creation, it is breaking down part of the boundaries associated with an object in a gallery. The methods of production are not foreign but familiar; allowing the audience to have a relationship with it because of, and not despite their associations about what art is and can be in relation to their everyday lives.

Claire Kearns
Convers[ation] III, Interactive Sound Installation, 2011
Convers[ation] III is a collective of taped recordings from people seeking or who have formerly sought asylum or refugee status in the UK, asking each what ‘Home’ means to them. As the tapes play simultaneously it builds a dialogue between the participants that didn’t happen in ‘real time’. This forms an ethereal connection between the participants that communicates the idea of ‘shared experience’. It’s an interactive sound installation that invites spectator to make a physical connection with the piece by stop/starting the audio and turning the tapes over. www.clairekearns.com

Rosie Kearton
Fragmented Memories, Slide Transparencies, 2008 - 2009
My interest is in how memory is constructed; the fragility of memory and the passing of time; memories that have an uncertain relationship with reality. My focus is on the transitory and fragmentary nature of existence, human identity and mortality, and in exploring the tension between the concrete and the abstract. The original material is from an inherited family archive of slide transparencies.

Sophie Kemp
Untitled, Paper, Ordnance Survey Maps, Shoe Rack, 2011
Primarily my practice discusses contemporary issues surrounding drawing, attempting to re-instate the immediacy of the form whilst working in a post-representational way to discuss pictorial issues whilst denying the traditional divisions between abstraction and figuration.

This work specifically links my fascination with linearity to my interests in heritage, landscape and place, particularly my sense of the landscape in my memory being indistinguishable from the physical home, whilst articulating a morphology of objects in response to memory and space.

Knit A Bear Face (Guerrilla Knitters)
Knit Vision, Knitted TV, 2011

Leeds' guerilla knitting group Knit A Bear Face is delighted to present: a knitted television transmitting Top of the Knits, I mean Pops. Knit a Bear Face's book TULLINOPO will be available to view. With a few of the knitted Monster's watching on in the background.

Giuseppe Lambertino
Assenza, Photography, 2011
Assenza is a reflection on the presence and meaning of absence that I experience in my aunt's house in Italy that is sometimes amplified by recollections. I have known this house all my life and it has been full of vitality and characters for many of those years. Sadly many of those people have now passed. Some of the rooms I photographed were once off limits as a child, quarters I could only enter when accompanied or some I never even went in to. Perhaps this makes me more curious and keener to record as many details as I can because even though I know this house through my memories and experiences maybe I don't know it as well as I thought.

Ronit Levin Delgado Rochas
The Metamorphosis 1 & 2, Pencil on Paper / Blue Sponge, 2011

This work is my interpretation of Kafka's story "The Metamorphosis". In the tale, Gregor Samsa woke up one day to discover he turned into an insect. This transformation reveals the complex relationships between he and his family in his "home", and raises existential questions in the reader. When I first read the story I found the fine line between the fantastical and dismal reality, the absurdity of it, fascinating. The themes of negative self image and self acceptance inspired me to create this piece.

Using a geometric and recognizable shape, I carved out of it an ambiguously shaped soft sculpture. The rendering is a deformation of the original shape, graceful and beautiful in its ambivalence, unlike Kafka's deformations that evokes disgust and revulsion. Alongside it is a printout of the story on which a silhouette is seen-not-seen, hiding behind the words. In this work I shine a light on Gregor's loneliness and isolation in the face of familial alienation, his conflict with the ones closest and dearest to him. I feel great empathy and compassion to the tragic hero, pathetically trying to validate his existence in the eyes of the world and to find his place in his 'home' life.

Simon Lewis
Cup of Tea, Digital Print of Pen Drawing, 2010

I’m an illustrator/printmaker based in Leeds, producing a wide range of different imagery combining both traditional and digital media techniques. My work generally focuses on black line drawings, using a very fine nib in a cross hatching style. Often I then add colour digitally or merge with textures to achieve the best visual language. Recently I’ve been focusing on drawing larger scale, highly detailed, black and white images of architecture, and then adding colours to the subjects using screen print.

Heather Matthew
Luv2, Mixed Media, 2011
Wallets are transportable pieces of home, carrying within them items of identity, mementos of loved ones, talismans for safe passage as well as nostalgic and everyday items like photos, stamps and money. They are at once intrinsically personal yet universal, creating their own narrative of personal stories when you open and ‘read’ them.

Jean McEwan
Up In The Woods, Instant Book, 2011
Jean McEwan works variously with photography, collage, text, language, video and sound to present and interrogate narrative strategies. Her source materials are made, found, appropriated and skewered into elliptical, associative, disjointed narratives through which she explores ideas of authorship, truth/untruth and fact/fiction. Her outputs have included artist books and zines, installation, experimental film, documentary, performance to camera, and audio-visual performance.

Laura Millward
Fearnley Street, Blackwork on Canvas, 2011
The image of the familiar red brick terrace has been constructed by an even and regular embroidery process known as Blackwork.

My dad was born on Fearnley Street, Armley in the 1950s and lived there until he was five. I remember him taking us to see the street being demolished in the 1980s.

Bob Milner
How did we do? Ink on Paper: a Two Part Installation, 2011
Being serious and committed to anything other than a wallet and lifestyle choice appears to be frowned upon. Running up debt for stuff; stuff that you don’t need seems to be acceptable, almost admirable. Applying yourself to thought and making choices based on any musing is dangerous and to be mocked. Distinctly average wins. Lacking in any originality always comes first. The crowds love an also-ran. Run out and buy your products with the free stuffed toys, the key rings, the novelty glasses; we all love a gimmick. Let your dull progeny fester in dark rooms with their cutting edge technology; so advanced that real life just cannot compare. Easier than dealing with the failure that is your legacy. Get pissed. Follow the seasonal trends; buy it because they told you to. Summer is coming; you better acquire yet another outdoor patio set because this year the key colour for entertaining is yellow. Outdoor heaters. Decking slippers. Tongs with comfi-grip. Sexually explicit apron for Moron Dad with a matching and inappropriate one for Moron Junior. It was funny the first time and continued to be equally hysterical on every subsequent occasion. Love me because I am different in a similar way to you.

Carla Moss
No Place Like Home, No Home Like Place, Mixed media, 2011

Our corporate location is often dismissed in favour of individual location; it’s ‘my’ world not ‘our’ world. The interdependency between place and home, home and place is suggested in this piece by the found objects becoming sachets of herbs or spices, common seasonings for food. The objects are transcended from their original identity to spiritual meditative pieces reflecting the places that we inhabit and may consider calling home. They are elevated into things of intrigue and mystery, becoming renewed and given a new sense of worth.

Kathryn Oubridge
Collateral Damage (Unfinished), Installation, 2010
Collateral Damage (Unfinished) comprises a bedstead installation with handmade bed throw, incorporating appliquéd army camouflage netting and printed textile labels. Each label bears the name of an Iraqi child who has died in the Iraqi conflict, in military terms the collateral damage resulting from both insurgent and military operations. As the title infers, it is an ongoing piece of work. The Tree of Life referenced in the embroidered inscription is an ancient, cross-cultural symbol, which appears in the Christian, Jewish and Islamic (and many other) religions. Touching on concerns that all humankind has experienced over centuries, Collateral Damage (Unfinished) seeks to take a humanitarian stance rather than a political or religious one. Kathryn Oubridge is an artist working in Leeds. www.kathrynoubridge.com.

Louisa Parker
Kitchen Sink, DVD, 2004
Louisa Parker is an artist making multi sensory work with drawing, performance, sound, books, installation and objects. The audience encounter is a strong theme, but all work centres on emotional affect. For the Home from Home show I present two works, Kitchen Sink, a DVD made in 2004 which observes family history and dynamics through an evocative video work in which sound is prioritised and Untitled Book, a drawing which provokes new drawing every time it is touched. These works will be accompanied by an installation of found objects.

Zeev Parush
Hardcover, Digital Photograph, 2011
Binding and protecting, revealing and hiding my inner story. The work is computerized collage of self-portraits taken around my home, that present thoughts and feelings about my past, present and future.

Jane Platts
Constructed Dresser, Dresser & Reclaimed Cardboard, 2010
Who am I! I am a true Yorkshire nackler who is on an adventure transforming timeless fabrics into vintage inspired superior designs. My retro take on the modern allows for that traditional twist to shine through, giving the customer hand made, versatile, stylish, reclaimed accessories from Sculpture bags which are truly pieces of Art to hand stitched reconstructed cardboard dressers.

Mikhail Pogarsky
Window to the North, Wood, Paper, Silk & Leather, 2010

Some flying creatures fall through the poet’s window. The poet collects these creatures and makes a book about their life.

Biba J Reid
Five Generations on the Yorkshire Coast, Objet Trouvé, 2011
With an ancestry of mariners and shipbuilders on the North East Coast, I was intrigued by a recent discovery of family photographs revealing hitherto unknown visits to familiar places. Spanning over a hundred years, my family connects through place and time. In this work I am composing a narrative to include my children in their ongoing story. I work in a diversity of mediums and the use and inclusion of Objet trouvé forms an important part of my creative practice. The photographs have been etched onto paper creating colouring and fragility which reflects the age of the oldest photographs.

Ellie Sanders
Autumn Shawl, Knitting, 2008We often define ourselves in relation to others, and it is this self-definition that is part of the core of my work. I am a creative dabbler, enjoying word play, colour and imagery across the creative arts, usually in an exuberant, naïve style.

Aine Scannell
Little Voice, Paper Sculpture, 2011
I have been using the motif of the house for quite some time now. I love how it symbolises so many things. We are each our own ‘home’ as such. In each one of us is an attic, a living room, a quiet room, a study or studio, a bedroom and a cellar.

I made an installation in 2002 called House Angel – I chose that title as an ironic play on the expression which goes something like 'Oh out on the street s/he’s an absolute angel (everyone loves him/her) but once s/he’s inside that front door and out of sight s/he’s a monster'. That installation was about how as children we are often trapped inside our little homes. Inside these places we are literally ‘subjects’. In that installation which was primarily about the experiences of children – the house-forms intentionally had no doors only windows.

In Little Voice again there is no door BUT this is an oneiric, an inner space. Here are imaginary friends, baby rabbits, friendly wolves, a girl with a loaf of bread - that looks like a miniature house, a bird that can take us on a flight of imagination and look after us, a silhouette that leaps with joy, a peculiar bicycled animal and a slightly timid monkey – all representing aspects of our selves. http://www.ainescannell.com

Jacob Schuhle-Lewis
The Yellow Wallpaper, Photograph, 2010
The Yellow Wallpaper is based on short story of the same name written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and published in 1982. It is a collection of first person journal entries by a woman whose physician husband has confined her to the upstairs bedroom so that she can recuperate from what he calls a "temporary nervous depression — a slight hysterical tendency," a diagnosis common to women in that period.

The story depicts the effect of confinement on the narrator's mental health, and her descent into psychosis. With nothing to stimulate her, she becomes obsessed by the pattern and colour of the wallpaper. Eventually she comes to imagine that there are women creeping around behind the patterns of the wallpaper, and then that she is one of them.

This Diptych portrays the woman's decent into madness, and the ambiguity surrounding the details of the story; where does reality end and the illusions caused by her declining mental health begin. It forms part of the series 'In Our Head,' a collection of collaborative portraits that take inspiration from fantastical, historical, and biblical themes.

Carrie Scott-Huby
Making Shadows on the Wall (in-situ), Wall Drawing, 2011

Making Shadows on The Wall is a direct response to the project brief ‘Home’. Word association in way of childhood experiences will be the starting point for personal remembrances, which will be brought to life by the spoken word. The piece is interactive. There is a similarity as to the game of Chinese Whispers. The viewer will be encouraged to become a participator by way speaking and sharing their own spontaneous response to the phrases written on the wall. The element of chaos is realised by participant’s active response, thus generating a different effect to the designed outcome.

Catherine Scriven
Daily Colour Projects: August, Printed on Paper, Thread, 2011
Catherine Scriven's artwork is a response to personal, social or historical narratives. She aims to visualise the extraordinary in the ordinary. Her pieces vary from small scale layered drawings and prints to large digital photocompositions printed on aluminium. Intimate objects with a personal narrative are often the starting point for the drawings, prints or artists books. They speak about the daily routines that are underpinning our lives. By using a limited range of colours within each piece Catherine's work offers a quiet and reflective mood. It counteracts any layers of information and complexity of content within the artwork.

Ruth Shaw-Williams
Unheimlich II, Concertina Book, 2010
'Heimlich can be seen as the realm of the tame, of intimacy, friendliness… the second meaning of heimlich is that of concealment' David Morley

Sigmund Freud wrote that 'among its different shades of meaning the word Heimlich exhibits one which is identical with its opposite, unheimlich. What is heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich'. The two attributes are not, as might be expected, mutually exclusive. From this idea emerges the phenomenon of the unhomely home.

Freud defines 'uncanny as the class of frightening things that leads us back to what is known and familiar'. Unheimlich II (the less common variant) is defined as 'unconcealed, unsecret; what is made known; what is supposed to be kept secret but is inadvertently revealed'.

Susan Slann
Forget Me Not 3, Painting on Found Wallpaper, 2010

Emily Speed
Doorknob, Paper in Resin, 2011
Doorknob. A functional object made specifically to indicate an entrance to a space for reading, thinking and plotting.

Emily Speed’s drawings, sculptures, installations and bookworks draw upon the metaphorical potential of architecture. Architecture is considered both as an emblem of humankind’s futile ambition for permanence and as container for often vital components of personal memory and identity. Working site-responsively she embeds transience within her works through propping, wedging, balancing and temporarily fixing.

Emily has received a number of awards, has exhibited internationally and will hold her first solo exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2011. Emily has also completed residencies at Salzamt Atelierhaus, Linz with Liverpool Biennial, Women's Studio Workshop, New York and Hospitalfield Trust, Arbroath.

Rebecca Strain
The Book Of Us, Mail Art, 2011

‘One cannot erase things once they have been written on paper. There is no going back’ Kenya Hara

From the moment we are born our lives are documented in paper. Official correspondence arrives on letter headed paper. Academic, sporting and professional achievements are acknowledged on paper certificates. Our identity and right to travel and work is dependant on the correct paperwork.

The Book of Us attempts to document a community who use paper for its creative worth. Because of paper we have books that perpetually gather and distribute knowledge, we have blank pages that compel us to create new ideas in text, image and form. In seeing paper as an opportunity to express ourselves and share our ideas with the world we attempt to overcome the fear of the possibility of irrevocable failure of making something on paper.

By sending your year and city of birth the project is factual yet anonymous. The content has been prescribed and yet it is personal. The paper chosen, the typeface or handwriting show individuality and creative choices. This collection of personal but nameless facts flowing through the letterbox of the exhibition venue challenges the readers perception of the artist as fabricator and relies solely on the contributors to make the artwork a physical reality.

Louise Tett
And You Are, Vintage Book, 2011
My work looks at knowledge, and specifically at the loss of the knowledge we have gained throughout our lifetimes. How memories become inaccessible and how people living with Dementia and Alzheimer’s shut down from the outside world until their home environment is all they can attempt to control. The pieces are all very fragile, highlighting our tenuous hold on the information we take for granted on a daily basis.

Kim Thornton
The Domestic Alchemist: Scoop, Ultrachrome Print, 2009
The idea of altering our perception of everyday materials and objects, of elevating them and changing their perceived value, is a recurring theme in my work. Using traditional female activities such as sewing, embroidery and knitting and the craft of gilding, I play with the materials to explore the incongruity of transforming them. In The Domestic Alchemist ordinary household items are transformed into precious relics, in the manner of museum treasures. This playful deception looks at domestic tasks and questions the value we place on them.

Lidia Vega Fuentes
Rewriting History II, Mixed Media, 2010In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard writes ‘a man, an animal, an almond, all find maximum repose in a shell’. My choice of shell is language. There I find my home. Abusing the qualities of language as a platform for communication and confusion, a playful treatment is applied: Dissection, re-fusion and isolation of the different phonemes and units of meaning to create a new grammar that allows the imagination to inhabit the space.

Sandra Whyles
Blue and White with Red, Yellow, Green and Black, Handmade Artist Book with Paper Clay Ceramic Box, 2009
Using the media of clay vessel making, printing, and photography I am continuously researching and experimenting with personal and social themes (past and present) in my art practice. Working with and counter to global popular culture I see my art as an evolutionary process.

I am consistently investigating, experimenting and developing the English and Chinese ceramic blue and white tradition. I have begun the process of taking the work into a unique direction, bringing into view the forgotten, the familiar and the hidden imagery and pictograms of African and Caribbean traditions, culture and life. In so doing raising questions, seeking enquiry and juxtaposing the aesthetic next to the political.

Lynette Willoughby
Nest, Feathers, Books, Paper, Cloth, Nest, 2009-11
I use found objects, recycled materials and a broad range of styles and techniques in my work, playing with strange juxtapositions, humour and rich textures and hoping to provoke and challenge. With a background in Microprocessor Engineering I graduated in Fine Art from Leeds College of Art and Design in 2004 and am a member of the Ghosts group of artists who have done site responsive installations in Situation Leeds (2005 & 2007) and Saltaire Arts Trail (2010 & 2008) and also stalls of artists’ books in Leeds (2010) and Saltaire (2009). http://lynettewilloughby.com

Jayne Wilson
Wax Wallpaper 1, Wax Encaustic on Found Wallpaper, 2009
Jayne Wilson’s work has developed with reference to the objects with which we surround ourselves and looks at the often complex relationship women have with the domestic space. She is fascinated by the repetitive tasks associated with household chores and their close link to obsession. She has chosen to explore this by using the repeated patterns of wallpaper painstakingly incising them with a scalpel, or manipulating and reworking them in wax.

Leslie Wilson-Rutterford
Stitched Up, 13 Embroidered Hoops, 2010
I like to utilise ordinary objects to create a new experience and bridge a gap between craft and art. The two series I submitted to Home From Home delve into my lifelong pre-occupation with health, medicine, aging and illness.

In the first, Stitched Up, I wanted to depict how woman are (born) ‘stitched up’. A normally private sphere of the tools and results of mutilation, operations, and surgical procedures imposed by society and culture, including women, on themselves, and on each other, are bared for all to see. The format, like a specimen container, puts these female issues under the microscope. Feminine pain, loss and sadness are counter-weighted by insecurity, vanity, and obsessiveness. We are specimens under constant scrutiny, with skin stretched, tweaked and slashed, needles pulled, eternally viewed.

The Four Sufferings (birth, aging, sickness and death) theatrically plays on our heritage where private suffering must live out on public display. In these pastiches of Victorian decor and motifs, enduring contradictions emerge: between dark and light; the bleak and the opulent, tragic and trivial. We must continually grapple with our mortality and our desires.

Kate Woodfield
Cage, Paper, Wood, 2011

I work mainly as a community artist supporting groups of people to produce their own work. My own work ranges from installations to small craft pieces in various media and I am interested in the effects which can be achieved through repeating a process many times and combining the results. I enjoy seeing the persistence and patience in other people’s work and I try to emulate this in my own pieces.

Cabinet of Curiosities

2010-03-18T05:21:00.001-07:00

Old Mining Building, University of Leeds
8th - 19th March 2010
Curated by Louise Atkinson

As part of the 13th Leeds International Book Fair, Artist Book Collective was invited by organizer Chris Taylor to present Cabinet of Curiosities, an exhibition of relational bookworks by local, national and international artists. The focus of the exhibition was a large cabinet with 14 drawers. Each drawer contained site-specific work by a different artist, pushing the boundaries of book art through the use of found objects, text, audio, sculpture and photography. Instructions were provided as part of, or alongside artworks, producing an interactive element to encourage the audience to contribute to the creation and dissemination of the work. By bringing together text, performance and collaborative practice, the work also referenced previous art movements including Surrealism and Fluxus and was complimented by additional bookworks exploring interaction and collaboration.

Ellie Sanders
Book-binding
A collection of abridged life stories built up over the course of the exhibition and woven into a cohesive frame by the authors.

Select a thread from the pile. Write your life story in 20 words or less on the strand of paper attached. Tip the rocker forward (you may need to move it back up the frame, away from you). Weave your story between the threads. Tip the rocker back again. Weave back the other way.

Linda Ingham
‘Open’ series: Specimen
The ‘Open’ series is inspired by a particular place of importance to me, close by my coastal home . . .The ever-changing nature of the estuary, the equal beauty of the calm and fury of water and wind, and the uncountable multitude of lives and deaths and the fullness and emptiness of shells; my parents’ courtship, my childhood summers, the long-past, mid-summer night suicide of a close one, in this place; the watery and skyful horizon as viewed through the hollow carcass of a gull, spied on the sea-wall whilst in transit to this destination; the frozen perfection of a dead starfish in the ice at the edge of the receding tide, the importance of movement - both of freight, lives and time and the needfulness of shadow to appreciate the light.

Kathryn Desforges
A Collection of Moments 02/03/2010
Created on the above date, this individual boxed bookwork contains a collection of drawings from surfaces around my home. Rather than being simply rubbings, each is a drawing in its own right, stemming from an intuitive interaction with each surface. Sound was recorded simultaneously, and no time limit was imposed, instead I simply stopped when I thought each one was finished.

The drawings are read from left to right, and each tells a story of the moment in which it was made. A timing, (relative to the time it took to make), is specified for the viewer to study each drawing, and the soundtrack which goes with it follows these timings. The aim is for the viewer to recapture the moment in which the drawings were made following each mark and sound to culminate in a final image.

Darren Bryant
Ludic Pocket Action & Pop-up
Accordions can fold in many ways, making interesting page folds and pockets for you the audience to draw, write, add, re-organize, or change. These pockets can be used to store bits of paper, making for an interesting instant book: A depository for exquisite corpse collaboration.

Exquisite corpse (devised by the surrealists) is a technique used for producing visual or literary art in which several people collaborate in creating a text or an image. Based on old parlor games in which players take turns writing on a sheet of folded paper, concealing part of the writing. Similar visual games can be conducted individually or collaboratively using collage and book folds. Feel free to draw, write, add, re-organize, or just turn the pages.

Rebecca Strain
Quiet Please
My work is mainly concerned with collaboration and accumulation, defabrication and then refabrication, and circumstantial connections. I am interested in place, ownership and value. I explore this in my work which embraces and challenges creative processes.

In this drawer you will find sections of eight books that I have read, most of which I have swapped or been given. I now present them to you the public as a library where your role is both librarian and borrower. I am interested to see what will happen when administration is taken out of the process and the rules are left to the people.

Alison Herbert
Inbox
An interactive piece of artwork that builds into one book or several small books. Write down 1 or 2 text messages from the inbox on your mobile, on the sheets of paper provided or on a blank page of any book. If you’re feeling arty, add a doodle with your message or on another blank sheet to add to the fun. You may include your name – this is optional!

This artwork is a play with words and phrases from ‘received responses’ or, ‘half’ a conversation. The unrelated messages from various people give the piece its narrative. It considers how and what we communicate, together with the snippets of conversations we have every day that are sometimes misconstrued.

Shaeron Caton-Rose
EverAfter
This drawer of books is part of a larger project called EverAfter. So far, this consists of three artist books each telling the story of a different woman known to the artist in the format of a fairytale with illustrations. Accompanying this is a soundtrack in which the three women concerned tell their life stories as fact. The contrast between the two elements – the spoken and written, the tale and the story, highlights the differences and similarities between our ideals and actuality and how dreams still inform day-to-day living.

Now the artist would like you to contribute to this project by making your own little storybook. Add to or take away from one of the small books provided using any of the materials in this box – cut, collage, tear, write, draw. Use a story from your childhood as inspiration.

Sophie Vrettos
What Brings Me Gladness: Daytrips and Donkeys
After watching the news one evening, I felt that the portrayal of Britain was all a bit grim; I really wanted to create something that celebrated our country. The Great British holiday seemed to the perfect subject, whether you love or hate them, I think this is something we should be proud of. Even now, as we are going through the credit crunch, the Brits have resorted back to holidaying in the UK. I created this book from my own family photographs, on day trips and caravanning holidays, as sentimental the book is to me and my family, I hope that you are able to flick through and be able to relate to my memories, and smile at our similarities.

Please take a postcard and write down your Great British holiday memories, they can be good, bad and ugly as you like! From caravanning catastrophes to amusements at Butlins, share some stories...

Francis Elliot
Void Pebbles
Based on a piece by the recently deceased George Brecht, in which he carved the word 'Void' into a large boulder, I have filled a drawer with small pebbles, each with the word 'VOID' written on it. Brecht’s idea is that anyone who sees the piece - or a photograph of it - owns it as surely as the person who actually owns the original rocks, and thus anyone who opens the drawer and sees the work can remove a small pebble as a symbol of a transference from an idea to a memory.

Bob Milner
Milk, 2 Sugars
Be your own editor. Bind together classic pages of the zine with a new cover specially created for this show. Use one page, ten pages, upside-down pages, it’s up to you.

Carrie Scott-Huby
Lifeloom - Strange Attractors
Chaos Theory is the inspiration for the development of this new Lifeloom series of artworks. Each series tells a visual and textual personal story. The text is inspired from the book ‘The Tao of Pooh and Te of Piglet’ by Benjamin Hoff. Chaos is realised by the participant’s responses creating different ways to the designed (final) outcome. Read the installation as a whole or read the individual tags. Choose one or more of the loose tags from the grey wool basket. Create your own response/s and tie it/them to the installation.

Larna Campbell
Correspondus
Contribute to the growth of this evolving book sculpture by leaving something inside one of the envelope pages and labelling the envelope. You can leave an object or item that you have in your pocket or bag; an old receipt or a button perhaps.

Victoria Lucas
Existence 2010
Today’s obsession with collecting lies in the act of photographing. Our digital footprints allow us to become immortal, and moments, places and people are captured; documenting the passage of time through the archive of imagery and the changing faces staring out from the paper. Facebook is an extraordinary example of this, individuals documenting their own existence and projecting it back in to the world as evidence.

Existence is an interactive artwork, in which participants exchange a passport-sized photo for a link to a blog upon which all the images will be added. The photos can be from any year, and can be a portrait of friends, family, or of the participant themselves. The images will also be compiled as part of a book, acting as a mini museum that documents a series of faces belonging to strangers brought together by the project.

Debra Eck
Three layer accordion fold
A three layer accordion fold with pockets and boxes that contain small books and artworks that the viewer may either a) alter or b) take if they leave something in exchange. I am interested in the intersection of art and everyday life so would prefer the audience to leave something that they happen to have with them, sweet wrapper, dry cleaning bill, etc.

Louise Atkinson
Book is a four-letter word
Turn the cubes to create your own poetry. The piece is based on the idea of an ideograph, a graphic symbol representing a word and used to convey a concept as a whole, such as in Arabic or Chinese. Using one or more cubes select words to convey your concept.

Alice Bradshaw
Static (2009)
The remains of a hole-punched text The Rocks Remain in constant motion.
I work with a wide range of media and processes involving the manipulation of everyday objects and materials. Mass-produced, anonymous objects are often rendered dysfunctional caricatures of themselves, addressing concepts of purpose and futility. I create or accentuate subtleties, blurring distinctions between the absurd and the mundane, with the notion that the environment the work exists in becomes integral to the work itself.

(sub)Missive

2009-03-09T12:26:00.000-07:00

Corridor Gallery, University of Leeds
6th - 18th March 2009
Curated by Louise Atkinson
Photos by Amy Balderston

(sub)Missive was the culmination of a mail art project in which artists from the UK, Europe, US, Canada and Australia each collaborated with an artist partner to create a new book work. Using the social networking forum as a platform for collaboration, artists investigated the dissemination of ideas with particular reference to (mis)communication and power relations.

Taking the hierarchical construct as a brief, each participant devised a set of instructions ranging from the single word to the diagrammatic and distributed them for their collaborative partner to make work from. The results of this experiment were displayed as part of the 12th International Contemporary Artists Book Fair from Friday 6th till Wednesday 18th March 2009 @ Corridor Gallery, School Of Design, University of Leeds, LS2 9JT.

Aimee Bebhinn Larkin with Larna Campbell

Aimee Day with Darren Bryant
My book instructions were from Darren Bryant (Australia) and came in the form of a concertina-style book, which I was to make with clearly set out instructions. Within the book were a series of cards detailing a step-by-step brief to form a sentence or poem from a provided selection of cut out words as inspiration for a visual piece. There were also cards provided to display my artwork within the book, which would allow viewers to interrupt and move around the order of the work.

I chose to respond to the sentence I constructed with a series of pencil line drawings forming an animation of myself within my domestic environment. This is a theme running through a lot of my work and ideas. My work observes issues of the visibility and invisibility of recorded transience as well as commenting on chance and how nothing can be controlled or repeated precisely. I’m trying to encapsulate what it is to be in a particular place at a unique moment, whilst capturing its physicality and the constant loss through time. The drawings are in sequence but still allow for interruption and can be moved about so as to highlight each individual action and draw attention to their relationship to each other in recreating movement.

Alice Bradshaw with Dovile Mikalauskaite
I am interested in the structure of language and have created a body of work exploring the physical deconstruction of texts often into morpheme- and phoneme-sized segments which are often left in an unfixed position.

Instruction: French Kiss
English and French language are relatively similar as they share Latin roots, compared to Slavic or Arabic rooted languages for example. However, my understanding of the French language is limited. I took a book, La Linguistique Structurale, Sa Portee, Ses Limites, (Structural Linguistics: its Range, its Limits) and deconstructed its 255 pages into circular pieces with a hole-punch. The tiny bits of paper fill a small cardboard box which has a volume of 444cm².

Amy Balderston with Suna Xie

The instructions received instructed exploration how one would construct oneself in visual means. Much of my work circulates taking the literal written interpretation and creating a complex image through a large archive of found/acquired objects and materials. Therefore I chose to isolate my surname as a means of inspiration. Then using the Collins Dictionary as a tool, simply combing through each letter of 'Balderston' noting each word holding a personal affinity. From this point sifting through my personal archive of images to create illustrations of each letter.

Taking 'a' for example, the form of the letter is created through images of Astigmatism, Australia, Abodes, Asparagus.
This allowed me to create a unique typeface. In terms of format the book work required flexibility to be viewed as the full word but also conform to some imitation binding. The concertina method worked perfectly.

Caroline Twidle with Louise Atkinson
My book instructions were from Louise Atkinson from Leeds and arrived in the form of a mind map on a sheet of paper. The mind map examined communication in a sociological way. Due to the textual nature of the map I decided to focus on using text in the book. I created a folded book made up of collaged text, this orginal copy was then photocopied twice to make three books. I created badges to go with the books as I wanted to focus upon one word which in my opinion somes up communication at the moment. That word was 'digital'. The photocopied books offered a contrast with the 'digital badges' as the new digital technology is gradually replacing the older forms of technology.

Darren Bryant with Kathryn Desforges

Dawn Hoskin with Holly Willis

Francis Elliott with Tom Hobson

Unable to secure a concept from Tom Hobson my designated collaborator, I looked around for ways to use the absence of material to record the problems facing collaboration. Struck by the constant archiving inherent within web 2.0, and impressed by my printer's ability to typeset without any direct intervention (just press apple+P), i added a love of removing things (in this case the opacity of the paper itself) with a series of archived conversations with the curator, et voila! Ether was printed, published and named on the last friday before the bookfair. Briefly revising the work on Sunday morning when I discovered that facebook even stored my unanswered texts to Tom Hobson, Ether was finished and in the post monday morning, an ephemeral record of cyberspace conversations.

Heather Gentleman with Caroline Twidle

Jenni Allen with Aimee Day
My instructions were make a 'Walk Book' - to record a journey from A to B which I take regularly. Then to use a second hand book as a base to present the finished journey, using the text within the book to narrate or hint at my journey. At the start of this year I had a major operation so during my recovery I could only take short walks. This mostly consisted of journeys to my doctor’s surgery twice a week and a trip to my local library to loan a dvd. I photographed and listed what I saw, smelled, heard, feelings I experienced etc. Using a second hand book that I purchased from the “discarded books” sale at the library I used snippets of text from the story inside the book to create a new book jacket, which depicts a map of my ‘road to recovery’.

Jennifer McQuistion with Joanna Kambourian

I received instructions from Joanna Kambourian on how to make what she called a "Gobbledygook". The book form is based on several folds and two cuts that create a square book which can be opened and viewed several different ways. Joanna threw in a challenge by adding a soft spine cover to the book which resulted in the image never being seen in its entirety again!

As I considered the concept of mis-communication and the disjointed way in which this book would be viewed, I began to recall an incidence from my teen years. When I was 11 years old my mother gave me the diary she had kept during her engagement, marriage and divorce from my father. One of the final entries was made shortly after my sister Angel was born (the third child). In it mom talked about what a blessing she was and that if not for God sending "her little Angel" she would have taken her own life.

As you could imagine, that entry had a powerful effect on me at such a young age. The mis-communication happened as I read her words without the ability to place them in context. As a result, I believed that my existence was not enough to keep her in my life. It wasn't until years later, after experiencing heart break of my own that I began to understand the emotion behind such an impulsive statement and the insignificance of such statements once that pain has healed.

In my book I illustrate a scene where God has sent a holy child to a praying woman. The color red plays a predominant role as a symbol of blood and spirit which is a connecting force between the woman, the child, and the wild life surrounding them. My emotional presence is represented by this wild life, it does not play a central role but it is surrounds and embraces the central figures.

Jodie Goddard with Kate Freeborough

The title that I was given was ‘things that make me smile’ I couldn’t bring myself to make an earnest piece of work about things which genuinely make me smile so I thought of occasions which had raised a smile out of visceral satisfaction rather than happiness. I thought about images from films that I found satisfying in their ridiculous gore or over the top explosions. One of the images that struck me was from the final scene of Tremors. In this film, a monster is lured to a cliff face where it crushes through and splatters on the floor in a brilliant spray of orange gunge and bodily organs.

My work often investigates desire and control and how desire can override logic and have disastrous outcomes. I like how this scene absurdly illustrates this notion as the monster is lured to a humiliating end through its desire to eat people. I felt that it was important to draw these images rather than take them from the film as stills, as this shows more commitment to the images that I wanted to recreate. I also wanted to use a medium which reminded me of childhood when this scene affected me most.

Kate Freeborough with Amy Balderston
"Recreate. Reconstruct. Reuse". I created a coptic stitch book using papers, postcards, drawings, envelopes found in places I frequent, all which were folded to A6. The covers were created from an old drawer found gathering dust in the store room at work. Each page tells it's own story.

Kathryn Desforges with Aimee Bebhinn Larkin

After pondering the instruction object for quite a long time, I was less concerned with what the box physically contained, and more concerned with what it seemed to represent. The main ideas which kept coming up were those of inside/outside, within/without. I took photographs looking through the holes in the box, and really liked their ambiguity. They give little glimpses of a world elsewhere. I decided to put the images themselves into boxes, touching on the idea of containment. The books are meant to be played with, and can be re-arranged into numerous different patterns, sometimes very open, and sometimes closed off and secretive.

Larna Campbell with Dawn Hoskin

I thought a lot about the instructions, the door and what it means, both literally in terms of form and colour, and metaphorically in terms of entrance, exit, arrival, departure, movement and journeys, and the passing of time and through space. I had lots of different ideas of what to make. In the end I decided to use sheet materials, mostly papers, cardboard, and some fabric, each of which represents a specific door. For a period of one day I recorded each door that I passed through and then used this documentation to inform the bookmaking process.

Laura Frame with Heather Gentleman
My received instructions: “Now my ladder is gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start”, “Rag and bone shop of the heart” and 'directions'.

I was fortunate not to have read the prose from which these quotes had been lifted (W.B.Yeats - the Circus Animals' Desertion) therefore could weight them with my own interpretation. Ladders – up/down(direction) – bones – ladder – ribs – escalate – body/bones as commodity – using such to ascend oneself in certain cultures.

I believe humankind is part of the animal kingdom. We are top of the chain however and have evolved to be such, as have our consciences. The former is not a fault, but we have a responsibility to be aware of truths thanks to the latter. I guess that is one of the scarce reasons to prefer to be human. With this project I wanted to highlight how some people use themselves(and, in cases, others) as pawns, devaluing themselves as interchangeable products in the process. This attitude is already rife towards other animals. The second quote above brought to mind operations to remove bones to achieve a certain body shape. If we were a bag of contents and we could just throw away bones - I think a lot of people think they would be very glad if that were the case.

Leslie Wilson-Rutterford with Alice Bradshaw
IF YOU CAN'T BEAT 'EM, JOIN 'EM: A presentation, a setting, a reading.
4 beer mats and a facsimile pub table present a setting to glimpse at women’s progress with alcohol, through the 20th C, from ‘protesting liquor prude’ to ‘shameless imprudent drinking hussy’. Whether tea-total or drunk, women are more harshly judged than men by society.The 20th C was marked by women’s attempt to escape oppression, subjugation and belittlement by men. At the turn of the century a few women tried to control men and their vile habits by trying to outlaw liquor. Unfortunately, this back lashed, and made them look like bad sports, and rather unattractive to men.

Later, with new found freedom, and a realisation that drinking was kinda nice after all they demanded the right to drink alongside men in bars and pubs. But, still on men’s terms, a woman could only enter the pub with a man, or with a group of women. If she went on her own, she was seen as a lush.Later still, a new dawn of women’s lib hit both sides of the Atlantic, and women took to drinking with confidence. It still wasn’t that cool to go out drinking on your own, unless you knew the barman by name, were middle-aged and a bit scarred emotionally.

Now, women everywhere have finally caught up with the opposite sex, and are drinking with complete abandon: clubbing all night, throwing up in the toilet, and collapsing in the gutter. Although a woman might end up alone on one of these binges, she probably started out with a man or a bunch of females, as society still has hypocritical views on women and drinking. On the surface women have equal rights to drink themselves to death, but society, and health authorities, still judges them more harshly for it. 4 beer mats provide a brief reading of 4 stages of women and drink: promoting them on the surface; elaborating in a facetious way on the reverse side, and covering up the insidious stain on women’s lives, ingrained in reality.

Louise Atkinson with Tara Bryan

Mandy Woodmansey with Jennifer McQuistion

I started the book with the idea of my friend Betty. I once built a house next to her's and she helped so much. She even hammered some of the roof on. We now live 2000km apart so when I collected things that reminded me of her they were maps of where we go when we meet and postcards she has sent me. We have brought up children side by side and worked and sewn together. She is very intellectual so the book form was appropriate and her many hours of garden design I included by surrounding the house shapes with garden gates. The cover paper is made with cardomom as Betty has introduced me to many spices from her European background.

Rebecca Strain with Tracey Turner
I was really excited about this project as I had not taken part in a mail art project before and I was attracted by the randomness. I spent quite some time thinking about how to put together my instructions so that they would be inspiring to whomever got them. The final draft was completed in the early hours of the morning and sent to Australia in early January.

Then I awaited my instructions. After a short delay they arrived. Initially I was amused by their playful format as 'Turners Patient Artist Book Generator' yet as time went on I became more and more bothered about how to approach this request.

In March I travelled to West Dean College to visit an artist and friend Emma Dexter. Whilst there we played the game of chance sent to me as my instructions. Then and there the book began to form. It became a source of reference for all of the possibilities that lay within that game of chance. I spoke to the librarian, the tutors and the artists at the college about the resulting statement, 'She felt hurt, betrayed, torn, beleaguered, what could she do?' and together we came up with a list of references for starting points that spanned from 'Eleanor Glovers work Shadow/Self which deals with some of Jung's theories to She's always a woman to me' by Billy Joel. The book is called BLUE, 4, 8 as these were the selections made that resulted in the work.

Rosie Brigden Kearton with Samantha Harris

My work for (sub)missive was made from recycled materials, envelopes, milk cartons, and used postal items. The overall theme was based on a quote from Yoko Ono on 'In- structure' - words containing IN were central to the concept. The instructions I received from Samantha Harris were very loose so and so I was able to interpret them into the way I wanted to work. I used her processes to construct a postal box containing 6 envelopes made from milk cartons and reconstructed envelopes. I incorporated typewriting, sewing, cutting, folding, collage and drawing. It was my first book work and it gave me an opportunity to explore different ways of working with different materials. I feel it has opened a door for my work to follow new directions and has been a valuable learning process. I used my blog to follow the process and the feedback from others during the period of the project was very supportive and positive.

Tara Bryan with Vivien Stokes
My instructions were minimal. They came in a decorated, shellacked brown paper envelope- a kidney-shaped piece of paper that said, simply, Earth Beans. My first thought was of the rocks that mysteriously (result of frost heaving) appear in my garden every year, in spite of my certainty that I dug them all out LAST year. Then to beach rocks- definitely rocks as small offerings of the planet. I googled earth beans and got the web site of an organic bean company in China.

I wanted to keep the book as minimal as the instructions, so I used the book structure Louise had on the submissive event page, printed a photo of rocks on one side and the Earth from space on the other, coated with acrylic medium, folded, cut, Voila! A book. It reversed nicely, so you can have the Earth OR the rocks on the outside, or you can set it up so you see the image on back in an open square. Then I made another one. Still couldn’t quite get those organic beans out of my head, so I made a flexagon with images of the Earth, a soybean field (repeated for kaleidoscope effect) and a close-up of soya beans, the versatile bean that feeds so many people and animals around the world.

Tracey Turner with Laura Frame
The instructions I received described the resulting book to be 'something impalpable', incorporating a map, and for text to flow from one page to the next. As a result I made my book out of maps and each word wrapped onto the next, in turn making another word incorporating the end of one word and the start of the next.

Vivien Stokes with Rosie Brigden Kearton

Julie Barratt with Jennifer Henderson

Time and Space

2009-03-09T12:25:00.001-07:00

Bowery, Headingley
13th June - 15th August
Curated by Louise Atkinson

Set within the confines of a domestic living space, Time and Space examined new book works created in response to nostalgic associations of place and memory, alluding to the obsolete, discarded and lost. The show included work by national and international artists, across the breadth of book art practice, exploring the book as a time-based medium in various forms, including sculpture, found objects, audio, tactile and conceptual.

Contextualised within a living room environment, the work functioned to question how we curate our own private spaces, how we present ourselves and what we choose to reveal to, and conceal from, the outside world. This environment also afforded the audience the opportunity to fully appreciate and experience contemporary book works, while allowing them time and space to reflect on their own associations and memories.