Everything Changes II

I began from the outside, with this book (to be shown at the UK Fine Press Book Fair in Oxford, 9 & 10 December 2023) working with the materiality of print to express what I am learning about change.

Invited to make a book for 2020 about Magellan’s quest to circumnavigate the Earth, “Everything Changes” by Cicely Herbert was perfect and also worked for the times we were living through. Her playing with mirror images had inspired this small book in 1998. Magellan exchanged a mirror for enough fish for ten men when they landed in Rio de Janeiro. I began to see translations/transactions as altered mirrors.

Contact with, and news about the ‘wild’, led me to scrape away rainforest from an unprinted etching plate- the utopian last plate for “The Monkeys’ Dream” (Rocket Press 1991). Part of this etching will be one of the extra pages I slide into the spine of this 2023 version of “Everything Changes”. Ideas start here in the letterpress room and also at book fairs (Ludlow). 

 

Everything Changes

The next 'Storm of Stars' prints will probably be more like these monoprints...

Collagraphs from the experimental stage of prints for “A Storm of Stars” were crying out to be reworked and they made the centre pages of “Recovered Vol. 3” unique.

Artist/tutors Peter Freeth, Anita Ford and Julia Wilson at the amazing much-loved Camden Institute, encouraged experimentation including my first soft-ground etched collage. Printmaking became even more experimentally tactile during a residency (at Simpson School in Milton Keynes) working directly with scrap, and because it had to be safe for young participants, water-based inks.

This double page is from “Printess & the p”, still on show at the British Library. In the right-hand corner of this page is a section of squashed sacking - my first ever collagraph. The ‘lamp’ above is printed from foil, the silk dress on the linen-press is darkened with printed carborundum-coated lace and I drew into polyvinyl adhesive, and used it to coat card, embroidery wool, sheepskin and dehydrated peas and carrots. I made “gravy” from epoxy resin and for the bed; cut various vinyl wallpapers. Now, aware that everything changes, I am trying to carefully use only what is still in my studio.