Now then. Today the Modern Art Oxford publication.
My brief is to create something on paper that follows on from the video work I made for ‘Keeping Time’. I’ve decided I want to take forward the relationship between the making process and the resulting product, and to do this I’ve been looking at folds. Not Deleuze, just paper.
The original plan was for a run of about 2,500 folded A2 pamphlets you could pick up for free at the gallery. Back in January I visited an excellent printer/bindery who showed me their machines for trimming paper and making multiple folds, and also talked with them about options for bespoke folds created from a metal die created for the purpose.
Incorporating pleats and cuts and irregular page sizes increases the production cost, so we’re now thinking about a smaller print run of 250 limited edition books available for purchase rather than for free. I like the idea of having a more substantial object at the end of the process – I always worry pamphlet-type things get thrown away.
One of two initial ideas is pictured here, designed for the original single-sheet pamphlet idea. This is where I’m beginning. The sketch pictured is a blank sheet with a simple folding pattern drawn over some trial folds. The one I haven’t pictured is a page screwed up into a ball, unscrewed, with all the resulting creases marked over in pen. I haven’t finished it because of how long it takes to draw dotted lines over every crease you get when you screw up a page into a ball. If I were going ahead with that idea I certainly would draw over each and every crease – the more the better – but drawing all those lines just for a trial gave me the distinct feeling I was using it to procrastinate from doing other things. I haven’t included the picture of the half-finished one here, not least because all the flattened down folds look like an overemotional aerial picture of a mountain range.
With these trials I started to think of ways for the publication to work as a set of folding instructions for the reader, so that by handling the book your hands create certain physical gestures. The physical gestures you make in the air around/with the pages are the important thing, rather than any diagrams or instructions that appear on the page in order to make those gestures happen. I’ve been wondering whether BSL might be a possibility – some fingerspelled words or signs making an announcement of some kind – though the work so far has not incorporated BSL and I don’t want to bring in another language arbitrarily. It would be nice if the gestures were something anyone could understand without specialized knowledge.
… so I’m still thinking about the matter. The matter always comes last. While I’m thinking I’m going to have a go at some folding, and see how one might create visual instructions for gestures as precise as fingerspelling. One thing at a time.
