Curated by Lilla Duignan and Jenny Leigh
Print Studio Cases, UWE Bristol
Friday 3rd October - Friday 14th November 2008
10 disparate people, friends & strangers, collaborated over a year on this mailed altered book project. Students, artists, mothers, makers, potters, painters, photographers, furniture makers.
Each of us started working on our chosen book, picking a theme, then snail-mailing this book to the next person on the grid: we used the round robin format suggested by Jenny, the project’s instigator.
Meanwhile we received another book from someone else, on their specific theme, working on it in our own individual ways.
The plan was, one tenth of every book would be altered by each of the ten participants; finally our original book would be returned to us so we could complete it by altering the cover – or not!
There weren’t really any rules, just to stay with the schedule of altering and mailing on the books:
Some books fell apart at the seams, some stayed together.
Some people instructed us as to specific pages we were to alter – some left this up to us to work out individually.
Some of us found the grid hard to understand, and needed help.
Timing was tricky, sometimes you’d end up with 3 books on the go or not see any books for a month…people went on holiday…towards the end the year felt l o n g!
Finally the participants all met up in Bristol to see & appreciate the whole collection of books: we agreed we all liked the idea of sharing them with other people.
This July nine of the ten books arrived at Jenny’s place in Gloucestershire and were shown as part of Forest & Valley Open Studio. Almost everyone who saw them pored over them and was totally engrossed, enjoying myriad individual approaches and expressions of creativity.
Lilla has arranged for 10 of 10 altered books to be shown at the University of West of England (UWE) Bristol from Friday 3rd October - Friday 14th November
If you’d like to handle the books email : lilla.visionworks@blueyonder.co.uk or Sarah.Bodman@uwe.ac.uk to arrange a time.
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