Today was the first day of workshops and my intention was to slowly introduce everyone to a set of ideas and skills to develop their knowledge of artists’ book practice and simple production methods.
There were a number of outcomes I had in mind in planning this session. I wanted to develop a sense of confidence in everyone to put them at ease with the project aims and their ability to carry them out. I wanted to design some engaging activates which further integrated the two student groups. I wanted my students to get involved in the teaching delivery to accelerate their own confidence in their skills too.
To do this I used my own collection of artists’ books as initial browsing activity to get every settled into the session. I invited my colleague les Rowe to come and talk about has photographic work and how he incorporates his images into artists’ book. I delivered a half hour PP presentation on artists’ book which have responded to place to contextualise the practice of book making and to further discuss approaches to our project brief. After a quick break we then had a micro teaching session, splitting the group of around 36 into 5 groups of 6 students. Five different folded book processes were taught by me and my volunteer students and we circulated the groups so everybody got to make a set of five books.
This was a busy but hugely enjoyable morning and by lunchtime everyone was buzzing with good feedback and my ‘teacher’ students were beaming with their achievement. A fantastic atmosphere was developing.
After lunch, to intensify this experience, I had loosely devised some group challenges to put these new skills to a creative test. The small groups were reformed and off we went…..
Task 1 was to create a collaborative group book with as many pages as possible using a prescribed method learned in the morning session in only 10 minutes.
They got stuck in straight away, no time for deliberation and this seemed a key point. Discussion came later as they considered construction, allocated roles and design solutions.
A great sense of purpose descended on the previously noisy space and a low hum of focussed activity took place. It was a noticeably significant shift as they all started working together efficiently.
After 10 minutes I first weighed the books, something I hadn’t warned them about. It accentuated the competition between the 5 groups, but I wanted to use the weight to make a point about materials used versus pages gained.
Once we established the scale from lightest to heaviest book I asked them to calculate the pages of each book. The competitive edge resumed as page numbers mounted and a heated discussion emerged around what constituted a ‘page’ in some of the more sculptural folded forms used.
In the end it emerged that the lightest weight book at 68 grams had the most pages at 889, not a bad gain for 10 minutes of making!
Task 2 required each group to make a collaborative book with ex library books of English and US landscape imagery as content and using any of the five book forms they had learned that day, in 30 minutes.
Again there was a quiet buzz of ideas being discussed, roles assigned and making taking place very quickly and they each group produced an unexpectedly well thought out and executed book. The book structure chosen by the groups were really well considered. Even the most tricky, the blizzard binding was used and each method was rationalised into the concept of the entire book.
Joe Ostraff and I were just so impressed at the speed in which our respective groups had bonded with each other over this first day and how they had soaked up everything I had exposed them to in such an intense day.
After all that hard work we headed to the beach and Antony Gormley’s ‘Another Place’ to chill out………………………
