the catalogue...

For the past few weeks MA Book arts have been working on the final show catalogue.
It's been a fun project with each artist making their own page which were then bound into catalogues by the group. We each had to make 85 pages which at first didn't seem too bad but actually took quite a while  tho',  for me, not as long as it took to decide what to do in the first place.
 
I had a stash of faded sugar paper which was cut and folded to size, with a front flap for our contact details. (..we all had rubber stamps made for this.) I wanted to add more faded squares to give the impression of missing  photos so lay pages in sunlight ..it worked but was a slow process  and I really didn't have room to lay out 85 at the same time. I tried to fake it with hairspray (I remember fixative darkening coloured paper) but decided although that worked well too I was getting fussy (-again) so gave up on that. It was sheer luck that every page has a faded edge..such a small detail but I like it! 
For the inside of my page I used a found photograph of a woman and child with the idea of creating a kind of photograph album.   I tried various ways of altering it to somehow erase or fade the woman but this really wasn't the idea I was trying to convey.

After several attempts I realised I needed something that better suggested separation or absence rather than some kind of erasure.

Eventually I settled on cropping the twosome so that half of my pages feature the girl and the other half, the woman. 

I printed off my 85 photos and spent a considerable time trimming  them to size only to decide that the glossy paper really didn't look right.  I reprinted them on heavier matt paper and fixed them under the flap using old-fashioned photo  corners.  I didn't anticipate  how thick the pile of pages would become with the photo and photo corners stuck in the centre. ( around 3" in the middle and but only one 1" at the edge)..I had to hope that everyone didn't stick something mid page making for one bulky book!


Last week we got together to bind. It was fiddly as hell but the catalogues look great.