Ex·per·i·ment

noun

• a scientific procedure undertaken to make a discovery, test a hypothesis, or demonstrate a known fact
• a course of action tentatively adopted without being sure of the eventual outcome

DERIVATIVES

Ex·per·i·men·ta·tion

Yes! That’s what I have been doing!

In reality I kind of do this most of the time: trying new approaches, new (for me) color combinations, methods, or just redoing a certain “story” perhaps from a new angle or with an unexpected twist!

So I have “entered” a phase of experimentation or to say it in a more down to earth way… 

I have been fooling around with ideas for the BOA project.

How about you?

Very quick...

Hooray! BookArtObject Edition One made it into Sarah Bodman's 'Book Arts Newsletter' edition 60, on the back page.

ps. slightly out of action, although I'll be back at my desk soon, as we MOVED HOUSE last weekend and I'm busy clearing all of our 'house' mess out of the office/studio so that the concreters can go in this afternoon and start work on the floor... in which case I may be able to move into the studio some time next week! It's so exciting, and I am SO TIRED... but it will all be worth it in the end. Meanwhile I've had no energy to post anything, do any work, make any phonecalls, you get the picture. So apologies for being a bad friend/colleague/blog person - normal service will resume soon.

Just a small Hello from Aine Scannell

Unusually for me I am not in much of a 'communication'  frame of mind,  at the moment.  I have been like this for a couple of weeks,   of course having  gastroenteritis  hasn't helped matters  - I thought I would just present you with a piece of art I made recently - just a squiggle of a trace monotype.  

I have just finished making a little minibook for a project which is being run by the Somethink collective (UK).  I had been meaning to do it for ages and I revisited  the blog, a couple of weeks ago, and saw that some new minibooks had been uploaded which spurred me into action.The 'book' had to be made from one A4 page.

I thought it would take a few hours but have been working at it,  on and off,  for a week.  Let's hope my edition of 10 books goes at a speedier rate.
Much more from me will come later.

EX LIBRIS...A NEW SLANT?

On the Blurb publishing blog I came across these paper sculptures. I like his reasoning: books are where ideas come from.

Visitors

Do you ever wonder if anyone reads this blog? You may not know it, because I don't think I've mentioned it, but I installed statistics software when I started this blog (you can take the girl away from programming but you can't take the programmer out of the girl. Or something) and every now and again I take a peek just to see if anyone's out there. And yes, they are!

In the last 7 days we've had 555 visitors (189 returning visitors, so even if you discount them we've had about 366 new visitors to the site), who between them loaded 965 pages. Generally it is 'page loads' that you look at rather than visitors because after all, a visitor may have got to your website by mistake or only looked at the front page; pageloads are a more valuable indicator of interest because the numbers indicate that visitors have actively selected pages to look at. Stat Counter also enables you to look at the geographic locations of the internet service providers who facilitated access to the site, and in the last week we've had lots of Australian, European and North American visitors, but we've also welcomed guests from as far away as South Korea, Hawaii (yes, it is American, but it's also in the middle of the Pacific Ocean so I'm excited!), Algeria and Hungary. If I want to get really geeky I can tell you that at 09:32 this morning someone in Sydney used their i-phone to look at our blog and read the entry about the Southern Cross University Acquisitive Artists' Book Awards!

So to all our visitors, hello and welcome! It's great that you are here and we hope you find something interesting to read. We also value your comments, so feel free to talk to us.

Correction alert in Paper Wrestling

Mea culpa! I'm pretty sure it's my faulty copying, and thanks to Fiona for her query which brought this to my attention.

In the tenth line I printed -  'treat its fibres with respect' - 'reign it in, but not too much'. As Fiona pointed out, and Claire has confirmed, the word should be "rein". Sorry everyone, but I'm glad we sorted this out before we all tried to fit 'reign' into the story. I'll now change this here on this blog and on my own.

A few queries

Hi all, I have just spent the best part of an hour trawling thru posts and comments from the very beginning of BAO and had a lovely time!

I did end up with some questions however which seemed to be sorted for edition one at different points in time and I figured I needed to check for edition 2, so please bear with me.

Book size: - ed 1 seemed to go for A5 (or about) is that likely to be the same this time around?
Colophon: - should we all adopt a similar approach to the colophon this time around?
Response v rendition: is it still ok to go for response rather than pure rendition?
Edition size - if there are 9 in each group is the edition size around 12-15 (a few spare to have in exhibitions, show or sell?).

Thoughts welcomed - I think they will put on my gravestone "she was just checking"!

Thanks and go well
F

Update, update, update!

Hello hello. News just in:

I'm delighted to welcome one last person to Edition Two, and that person is the very lovely Aine Scannell, who is currently working in Scotland at Fife and Dunfermline Printmakers. You can also find Aine on Artists Books 3.0, so I guess many of you will already know her from Ning! As of now I think we should announce that expressions of interest for Edition Two are closed as we have 16 members (including Ellen Sheffield and Aine).

At the moment the entries for each text look like this:

Jeanette Winterson

Angela
Ronnie
Amanda
Anna
Abi
Aine
Sara (doing both?)
Caren (doing both?)

Claire Beynon

Carol
Jane
Guylaine
Di
Alison
Fiona
Sara (doing both?)
Caren (doing both?)

Those of you good at arithmetic will notice that Louise and Ellen's names aren't yet on the list. Di and Fiona volunteered to do either project and I've put them in for the Beynon text. Alison, I wrote you down on my Beynon list and going back I can't find how I determined that!

Regarding permission to use the Winterson piece, I haven't yet heard (not surprising really). I've emailed the author through her official website and I've emailed her agents in New York which took a while as the woman I thought was her agent has moved to a different firm and it took ages to track down a name and email that works. Fingers crossed we hear soon. If we haven't heard anything by the end of August we may have to start looking for a different text and put the Winterson extract on hold for a future edition.

Last news item: I've heard back from the organisers of the Southern Cross University Acquisitive Artists Book Awards to say that they would be delighted for us to submit a group entry. I am happy to pay the $25 entry fee and put in the entry form. WHAT I NEED from all of the Edition One participants is a short artists' statement about their piece in 50 words or less, saved as a Word document and emailed to me ASAP! I have the photos already so I can do the entire submission. If Edition One is selected then all Edition One participants will need to post me one of their books by the end of December so that I can get the complete set to SCU in time. AND you will have to let me know if you are happy for your piece to be sold at the exhibition in February...

PS. There is nothing to stop any of you applying for the exhibition on an individual basis! And on that note, Anna brought to my attention the Philadelphia Centre for the Book's call for entries for their forthcoming artists' book/dance exhibition. I've just been having a short email correspondance with their president, Amanda D'Amico, who confirms that overseas artists are welcome to apply. The exhibition contains a performative element in which selected works are interpreted in dance! It sounds fascinating; I'm waiting to find out their bank details so I can do a direct transfer of the entry + membership fees before committing but it's definitely an intriguing idea...

my introduction to the group.

Hello fellow book makers/artists. At last , with many,many thanks to the wonderful Di we fianlly set this up.
At present I am very busy with family visiting,preparing for promised exhibitions but never fear the brain is here I think! anyhow something works up there as I feel it tcking, ticking.....
Good luck to everyone who had decided to participate in theis project and I look forward to the end result. Until later bye .........
Alison.

after hours thoughts...

Does it happen to you? To have a super busy schedule, every day planned to the moment of exhaustion, and then making up for the absence of free time by thinking and developing ideas while asleep?

I cannot justify it any other way, it must be because there is no leisure time lately that I have been waking up fully aware of well thought out artworks ready for execution! Or so it seems for a while. By noon if I think of what my night's  extravagant plans were... well, they don't seem that inspired, that great after all! And yet, in all its sleep state weakness, I recognize in my art planning while asleep activity a likeness to a child's enthusiasm for the new play/game ahead, in this case our BookArtObject project!

I wonder if you are feeling the same way; has any of you started planning (awake or asleep!) the next book?

---

in the picture: "summer blooms" one of my latest monotypes

Introducing myself: Abigail Thomas

Hello all, and a big thank you to everyone from Edition One for welcoming us newbies to Edition Two. My name is Abigail, I am an artist who lives and works in London. My artwork more often than not has an outcome in book form and has been heavily influenced by my day job in a library. I recently curated an exhibition called Micro-Pages that toured libraries and archive centres in the UK; you can find out more about that project on my website here.

I have two blogs; one focusses on the textile aspects of my art practice and the other on the book arts side of things. You can also see images of my work on my flickr page and on my main website. I am really looking forward to Edition Two and cannot wait to see what we all produce.

Southern Cross University Acquisitive Artists Book Awards 2011

Just when I wasn't expecting it the invitation appeared on the Artists' Books 3.0 Ning website! Knowing that the exhibition isn't until February 2011 I hadn't thought that the entry forms would be ready yet, but here they are (click on the link on the "News" section on the right hand side of the page to download the entry forms as a .PDF file - thank you to Diane for pointing out that my original link didn't work!). Amanda Watson-Will who participated in Edition One should be congratulated because an image of her work from the 2009 exhibition was all over the Ning website post! Amanda, I hope you don't mind but your book is so beautiful that I had to put it up here...










On behalf of Edition One artists I have emailed the organisers enquiring about whether it will be possible to put the entire edition in as a group entry, and I'll let you know when I've heard back. In the meantime there's nothing stopping us from entering individual works, and it is a really good exhibition. The entry deadline is months away: 6th December, in case you're panicking, and the show opens on February 22nd and runs until March 19th 2011.