Books
The narrative form of the book, with all its possibilities, is what interests me. I like the range of materials and ideas which can be incorporated into exciting and imaginative formats. Occasionally I make a unique book, but most are small editions, often called democratic multiples because they are not expensive.
My books are mainly visual and the content deals with ideas about life, death and human values.
Ideas which are often challenging, are gently probed, often using an analogy found in nature. The thought processes before production are the most important, but I enjoy making because I always make the form of the book serve the idea in it. The form of the book is therefore very varied.
I print either digitally or by hand and all my books are hand stitched and bound on archival paper.
My books are in The British Library, the Tate Library Archive, the Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections Library, books in Marseille at Atelier-vis-a-vis, the Artist Book Archive Milan, The University of Bilkent, Turkey and The University of Puget Sound, the Universities of Bristol and Cardiff Metropolitan, Tacoma USA and many private collections around the world
I have led a group called “Superstudio, Bradford”
The group, which was made up of Lecturers and MA Alumni from Bradford College, engaged with Atelier Vis a Vis in Marseille, France and took part in several successful book fairs and events there.
I have also led “Hard Copy” a collaboration with Prue Dixon, Caro Blount-Shah and Barbara Greene.
Featured books:
Book pages may look better if you turn your phone or tablet sideways to landscape format.
The Land – Layers’ Through Time.
These are two books which were part of the Grassington Festival Installation of the same Name. The Landscape of this country has been overwritten by man many times. It holds so much information about the past. See my Installations pages for more information.
“The Landscape, The Palimpsest, The Archive is a book which can hang from its string to display its “replica” archaeological find.
“England was part of the Continent” is my reference to the Mesolithic period when there was just one joined land mass. Its significance today is the forced separation called Brexit.
Reading Water (Isherat)
Reading water is a complex skill through which the weather and water can be understood and its effects predicted by looking for visual and aural signs. Isherat means the same thing and was used by sailors before technology developed, often to sail great distances.
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Looking for The Enemy
Borders
Borders can be boundaries or garden features.
This is a book cut in half by a border. It can be bought as a pair, to get the full picture, or just as a half. The overlays on tracing paper show images of recent tragic refugee border crossing situations .
Borders in the garden are full of plants which have crossed borders, stolen in arrogant colonial fashion from other countries and renamed. (“London Pride” is among the illustrated introduced plants. It is a native of Turkey.) We call these plants our own.
Why are people who need to cross borders to safety not so welcome here?
Looking for The Enemy
Some people need to vent their anger on an enemy and can easily find one. Others are afraid of everything. Are we right to look in the sky for our enemy? I began this book in response to George Bush’s War on Terror.
De La Terre
From the earth, a hanging book which illustrates the burgeoning garden from winter to summer and the feeding of it with compost.
Compost is death and also life.
The book is translucent and is printed on one side with graves and on the other side with a flowering garden.
It is designed to hang in a window where the sun shines in.
Something Rich and Strange
A fan shaped book which opens out into a circle. The theme is the circularity of organic matter, compost, soil and ultimately ourselves. The listed chemical elements in the soil are the same in the human body. Further information can be found in the Installations area of this site, where the installation of the same name is described.
From Dead Stars. This book is made from off-cuts of Something Rich and Strange. (Quite rightly it is about recycling!) The chemical elements in us and in the soil originated in space, from the death of planets.
Nichoir/ Nest Box
Nichoir/ Nest Box
An exhibition in a box, covering the many ways we exploit or misunderstand birds. It contains a mixture of prints, photos and objects, including a kit to make a paper Nest Box. This is of course is no use to birds.
I, With the Wooden Insect.
Dylan Thomas’ poem about climbing a tree. The book spine was made by an insect grub and the cover is an original etching of human thumb prints. The images inside are derived from the garden, showing the ravages of insects and of man.
Frottage of wood was used for the left side pages.
After Real
A book about the digital and Virtual Image. Do we more often look at second hand images of nature than the real thing? Through the book the reality of a leaf becomes distanced. Through frottage, collage, photograph, print and reflection, ending in some html-style text alone.
The Good Old Days. An anti-nostalgia book.
Post cards from the mid 20th Century, illustrating the sad realities of the recent past. Seventy- year-olds who were children then, have written fictitious but telling messages home. Each pack contains seven original old postcards.
Panopticon – The All Seeing Eye
Following my exhibition “Carte Blanche” about mapping and about google in 2022, I decided to make a small book in the form of a map. The Book unfolds to show an Ordnance Survey map detail, together with part of the same area from Google Earth. The OS map is gradually erased of all man-made information, taking us back to a world without maps, leaving only contours and rivers. The google digital image shows the evidence of centuries of occupation on the land.
On the reverse there is an imagined view of space overlayed by the names of 27 earth viewing satellites, all of which collect information about the earth and about us. Some of them can read your car number plate.
The book contains references to map deployment as a means of control and power and of Panopticons, the all-seeing eyes, first used in prisons in the C18th.
Holes Book 2009 – 2023
A unique book, designed and bound by me at Leeds College of Technology in 2009; content completed in 2023. The cover has a debossed hole and a photograph sandwiched between the binding layers. The drain cover was photographed in the grounds of an Asylum.
Partly formed as a response to Arte Povera and partly in anger, this page references artist Lucio Fontana. It is torn, painted and crossed out.
The anger is directed at nationalism, war and vandalism against nature, along with other antisocial power games and disasters.
The colophon lists all the artists amd sources referenced.
My neighbour cut down a much loved oak tree and poisoned the stump by filling drilled holes with herbicide.
The ruin of a country. I don’t like flags.
It’s not a game! WW1 ships on which many men died.
The Pantheon Rome. The light shines through.
Originally in 2009 there were four books. Two were sold as they were then, but the remaining two have been worked over in 2023 with additional images and texts, printing and collage. The paper is mixed, found and recycled. One copy stays in my archive, but the remaining book is for sale.
To enquire about the prices of any of these books please use my email link in the “contact me” page of the website.