artists books | of life and art

OMG! Only two weeks to before my work needs to be ready for the Artist’s Books Exhibition at the Riddoch Art Gallery. This is part of a group exhibition with the Thumbprint Printers Group, and I am pretty excited about it because the Riddoch Gallery is a wonderful regional gallery.
At this stage things are coming together quite nicely, but I still have a lot of finishing off to do and that always takes more time than you think it will.
I have a collection of books called Specimens.
It includes this Crabs book…

I still need to print the pages for this book and make up a latch system. The crabs are made out of recycled parts from my old electric organ that I played as a child (when they were all the fashion).
Also, this birds book…

…which may challenge some people’s ideas of what constitutes a book, but I like it. I have filled the flask with name labels for different birds – those which the collector has been unable to find specimens of because they have been collected into extinction.
There is also a book of Jellyfish specimens. This book just needs to have some text added and be bound now.

Oh, and I need to find some more old rubber stoppers to go in the tops of the test tubes.
I wanted to get some waterry looking jellyfish pictures to go inside this book, so I have made monoprints using water soluble oil pastels.

I was quite happy with the results although I am still experimenting with the idea if adding a little ink painting to them.
There is also a book of Fish specimens on microscope slides, but this one is the least developed at this stage.

I am using an encaustic technique on the microscope slides and am incorporating bits of rubbish that I find when I am walking my dog.
All if the Specimens books use mostly recycled or found objects.

I have two other books as well. This one is called Fly and is a necklace book.

I still need to string it up on some rings and a chain.

Finally, I have this one that I call Mehetibal in the Garden. I have used a cyanotype printing technique and also some lino prints on to clear plastic.

It is also still waiting to be bound. I am intending to make a simple concertina binding incorporating sticks, and I am also planning to add some broken egg shell to some of the pages.

Looks like a busy couple of weeks coming up for me. Stay tuned for a sneak peak at the finished products soon.
All the best,
Sharee

Dear Blog,
I am sorry I have neglected you. We have been busy, in a lazy stay at home, do things that you love, kind of way. It gets to this stage of the holidays and I feel like I am really on top of everything – house is tidy, bills are paid, meals are planned, exercise done, artwork is in full swing. Unfortunately I know from experience that it all ends next week when school goes back, and we go back to juggling schooly stuff, and homeschool groups and after school activities, so I’ll enjoy it while it lasts.
Here are some things that we have been doing in our house…

I have been doing lots of fabric dying experiments. I am going to use these pieces to make a birthday present for my son’s girlfriend. I have just tried a technique using flour paste from Jane Dunnewold’s book Art Cloth, and I loved the results.

This is one of my favourite pieces. It was tie dyed and then I added a mono print using dye paste.

I am planning to do some more work on these pieces using discharge paste today and then maybe some printing.

The other thing I have been experimenting with is encaustic work. I borrowed Encaustic Workshop by Patricia Baldwin Seggebruch from the local library and was so inspired by it that I rushed out and bought some basic encaustic supplies. Encaustic is painting with wax, and all you really need to get started is a bag of wax and a heat gun, so it’s fairly cheap. I really enjoyed the technique and I can see lots of potential for using this technique in some of my artist’s books, especially the Specimens series that I am working on at the moment.