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Book Arts |
We are artists Paul and Maddy Hearn, who sometimes collaborate as Pineapple Falls to make and share books, collage, papery sundries, merry objects and other things.
It started by sticking a poster in the sitting room window. Pineapple Falls is Open!
We built a workspace in our front room, a simple website, a storage facility in our spare bedroom and made broadcasts from our bed. Pineapple Falls is a channel for exploring the potential of making and sharing together with restricted space, time and resources.
We began clumsily by broadcasting. Our broadcasts were messy and clunky, reading books bought from charity shops aloud and playing records into the Internet using a free broadcasting app on our phones. We had no listeners.
Shifting focus.
We make pamphlets, multiples, page-works, simple books, junk journals, sound artefacts, crap posters, greetings cards and collage salads using whatever we can find. We like reflective surfaces, plastic bags, packaging, old recipes, cats, pockets, stickers, ‘how to’ books, pop songs, silly graphics, and things found whilst we are out and about.
We like European supermarkets.
The shop is a channel to locate, share and sell our work and a place to meet others with shared interests. We have a till, a toy one, we are aware of what that may or may not mean.
First, we set up a stall in Plymouth City Market. It provided us with an additional, temporary workspace outside of the house – plus we spent the day together eating pork pies and chocolate and working out the next steps. We made some sales, had nice visitors and made plans.
Pineapple Falls worked with Spacex Gallery to bring Wonderful Grotto our pop-up-shop to the daytime, subterranean world of the Cavern, Exeter’s longest running live music venue. At Wonderful Grotto visitors could browse and buy a pic’n’mix of artists’ books and zines. This was our first adventure into sharing and selling others’ work. We launched Typing Pool Party at the Cavern, where we invited visitors to generate typewritten texts on our growing collection of elegant typewriters for a book work to be self published and distributed.
Last summer Wonderful Grotto popped-up at Sea Change, a new music festival organised by Drift Records in Totnes. Invited to curate a table of artists’ books for the festival in the record shop, we took this opportunity to further test how to present and sell experimental artist made books at events. We quickly learned that the environment of this independent record shop, within the wider context of a music event, suited the work and introduced us to an actively engaged audience from across the UK.
Pineapple Falls’ first DIY show Something Else in sleepy Ashburton was the result of a week of experimentation; using the gallery as a test space with papery stuffs and objects collected.
For this show of works for the cabinets in UWE Bower Ashton Library we decided to think back upon everything we’ve done so far and select a few pieces we’d like to share.