Thanks to a photo taken in India by a traveling friend, I found the right bit of inspiration to fuel my project around toilet paper rolls. I started experimenting with the cardboard in a new way and shot a timelapse with my iPhone during part of the process.
The final form of this project is yet to be determined but now I am well on my way with a clearer idea.
Even though one year flows into another with no real difference between them, at this time of year it always feels as if we’re about to start something new with the hope of life being better (or maybe just different) in the coming year. It’s a time of reflection on the previous twelve months, mostly focused on levels of happiness.
I’ve been feeling the need to take a step back and review all I’ve accomplished since deciding to pursue art full time in 2010. I don’t feel I can move forward properly without it. Sometimes I feel that I’ve done an incredible amount of work, and other times I feel I did very little. I’m hoping this blog post will document things realistically, as well as show what worked well and should do more of, and what I can safely never do again.
» Artwork:
I’m really happy with this area of my practice. I produced a healthy volume of new work over the course of 2010, including continuing with the explorations of altering books, and building on the portrait series of women begun in late 2009. I also forayed into large-scale installation work, which is something I’d like to do more of in future.
Artwork by the numbers:
– 16 individual altered books, framed and ready to hang
– 25 altered books as part of the Forgotten Knowledge series
– 1 large-scale paper tree
– 15 photographic portraits for the Imaginary Girl series
– 5 canvas prints of Imaginary girl portraits
2011 Artwork Goals:
– schedule more time for producing new work
– make experimentation and play a higher priority
– come up with one installation project
– explore creating street art
– produce lower priced inventory
– take on work commissioned by clients
» Exhibitions:
This is the area where I put most of my time and energy last year, and ended up participating in a ridiculous amount of shows because of it. Most of these shows were not career building in any way and had little value beyond an item fleshing out my CV. I confirmed that I need to move beyond showing in theatre lobbies, and be pickier about the group shows in which I take part in order to grow my career. There were a few exhibitions that were terrific for exposure and helped raise my previously non-existent profile in the arts community. The experience this past year taught me that exhibitions are not the more important thing I need to do with my work and in future I will do much less of them.
Exhibitions by the numbers:
– 3 solo shows of three different bodies of work
– 11 different group shows
– 2 juried exhibitions outside of Canada -> Portland, and the UK
– 2 firsts thanks to Container Art -> forays into both public art and installation work
– 1 multimedia collaboration with Resolve Design to create the Tree of [Un]common Knowledge
– 1st time taking part in the Eastside Culture Crawl
2011 Exhibition Goals:
– be more selective about exhibition opportunities
– show outside of Vancouver
– apply for artist residencies
– get paid to show my work
» Selling Work:
I gathered up all the numbers for the first time before I started writing this section and I’m actually surprised at how much work I sold last year. It was the most I’ve sold within the period of one year, which is a good sign. But in order for this career to be sustainable long-term I need to focus more on selling and diversify how and where I make my work available for sale. The bulk of this year’s sold work went to people from my immediate network which confirms what I’ve been told. Most of these sales occurred as a direct result of sharing my work through social media, and also through face-to-face interaction at the Eastside Culture Crawl. A small fraction of the sales came through my Etsy shop and most of these were to people outside of Canada.
Sold Work in 2010 by the numbers:
– 11 altered books
– 2 large metal prints
– 5 small metal prints
– 3 cradle frame collages
– 3 commissioned canvas prints
– 26 postcard sets
– 1 photographic print
2011 Artwork Selling Goals:
– Approach local shops about carrying my artwork
– Research on markets such as Portobello West, Granville Island, and Blim to see if they’re a good fit
– Develop better branding and strategy for selling work online through Cargoh or Etsy
– Research stock photography sites to sell my photo archive
– Participate in the Eastside Culture Crawl
– Increase number of sales from 2010
» Business Development
Business development is the area I find hardest to focus on because it doesn’t come naturally to me. It requires the ability to see the “big picture” and think beyond the fine details of making artwork. Thankfully the entrepreneurial spirit has taken hold and I invested time into laying the ground work for my business. I created an inventory spreadsheet to track information on the artwork I create, and it became an essential tool I often refer back to in many situations. I made use of Harvest to keep track of the time I spend making art, and also use it to create and send invoices. I began using measurable information (i.e. hours) to accurately price my work instead of roughly guessing as I embarrassingly have in the past. I also started using Mailchimp to send out a monthly newsletter and keep people up-to-date with what I’m up to.
Business Development by the numbers
– 45% increase in subscribers to my mailing list between April & December
– 1 dedicated studio space (my first ever!)
– 1 awesome inventory spreadsheet
– 12 newsletters sent out in 2010
– 500 business cards printed
– 1 article in the Georgia Straight promoting the Eastside Culture Crawl
2011 Business Development Goals
– Increase the number of subscribers to my mailing list
– Diversify how I sell my work
– Find and work with a business development mentor
– Develop more of a vertical inventory
– Figure out ways to produce products from my existing work
– Track the time I spend on administrative tasks
– Redo my website to better showcase my work and skills
– Increase exposure of my work online
– Teach workshops on altered books & social media for artists
» Miscellaneous Bits
Figuring out how to shape the artist career I want is an on-going process. I’m still fine-tuning a schedule that works best for me, while trying to get away from the 9 to 5 work day that seems to be deeply engrained. I often forget I have a FLEXIBLE schedule. It’s a constant fight for balance between pure creative time, administrative tasks, and business development but at least I’ve learned to keep art producing days completely free of other things.
I’m glad to finally know more people pursuing art as a full time career because it’s a great thing to have a network of like-minded peers to call upon for advice or just share experiences.
2011 Miscellaneous Goals (Without the numbers)
– Work with a more experienced artist as a mentor
– Meet with a group of fellow artists every two weeks
– Conduct a series of interviews with artists about their careers
– Find a flexible well-paying part-time job working with a creative company
– Find an affordable studio space outside the home
– Save money for new camera equipment
– Exercise every day, including walks and yoga
I was away on Quadra Island with Boris’ family last week which was a vacation but it also meant a long break from working on this project. Monday I resumed cutting up encyclopedias and as of today I have twenty-one of the twenty-five books completed. I love it when hard work pays off and things go smoothly. When all the books are done I can get started on some of the other ideas I have in mind to pull together for the installation. I have about two weeks left before this gets installed in the Container. I’m excited.
The books featured in these photos contain seaweed, deer vertebrae, some form of fungus, chamomile, acorn caps, and drift wood. I had to rehydrate the seaweed in order to work with it because it was too dry and brittle to put in a book after sitting in my studio for weeks. I was amazed at how well it revived. It will dry out again over time, as will the chamomile flowers, but I’m okay with that.
Previous posts about this project (which will be on display in the Container Art show at the PNE): [1] [2] [3]
This week I’ve been working away at the individual altered books that will be assembled into the installation for the Container Art show. I set a goal to complete ten of these by the end of this week and as of yesterday afternoon I finished number eight. I’m very pleased with how this project is slowly coming together. Once all the books are finished I need to do further planning on how these will be displayed. My idea has evolved a bit since I wrote up the proposal over a month ago.
This is a very photo heavy blog entry because I wanted to document the process of making one of my altered books. I chose this one specifically because it is my first book with movable parts. It was a very involved process and I had a lot of figuring out to do as I went along, but I loved every minute of making it. The idea of making a book with movable parts was motivated by an artist call put out by 23 Sandy Gallery in Portland, which I intend to enter.
The whole process started with selecting the right book for the project, one that was not too thick or heavy, and then I pulled out bits of ephemera to select the visual aspects of the book. I narrowed things down to a set of colourful pasteboard butterflies and started brainstorming ways of how I’d like them to move within the book. I decided the best way to proceed was to make a paper mechanism based on the designs in my book Paper Engineering & Pop-ups for Dummies. Most of the designs were vertical and I needed something to work horizontally, so it meant making a prototype in order to figure out how to make it work for me. Learning by doing is often the only way I can figure things out for myself.
Pictured here are the pieces of the prototype mechanism I made from cardstock. The next step was figuring out where I wanted to place these in the book and how I could adapt it to my needs.
I decided to incorporate two working mechanisms into the design and cut two niches into the book in the lower right and upper left, leaving a layer of pages on either side to hide the mechanisms.
I made two new mechanisms based on my original prototype but smaller so they would fit within the height of the stacked book pages. I needed to leave a bit of space underneath so the paper rod in the middle had room to move freely without catching on the bottom of the niche.
I padded the bottom and top edge of the niche with pieces of paper cut from the book itself.
(I skipped photographing a few steps here). Pictured below is what the book looked like after all of my work with the mechanisms was complete. They were tucked away in working order within the book pages with the middle rod poking through a hole through the top layer of pages. I chose two brass watch parts as the turning knobs. At this point I started figuring out the composition of the book and realized I needed to reconsider the red gears as the platform for the butterflies.
I chose sewing pattern paper as the first layer on the background because I love the yellow brown colour and warmth of the paper. I knew I would add something more to it as I went along but wasn’t quite sure what that would be.
At this point I had also decided to make leaves for the butterflies to sit upon, and these would be the pieces that turned. I made the leaves from green paper with magnolia leaf skeletons layered on top to make them look more real. This is my favorite detail of the whole artwork, and I kind of wish I hadn’t hidden so much of them under the butterflies when I attached them.
The final touches on the book was to add a few more decorative elements to the pages using scraps of Japanese paper and printing a leaf design with a rubber stamp.
There are eight butterflies all over the book, with five attached to the movable leaves and three in stationary positions on the background pages.
After all the work I did on this the actual movement within the book is very simple, it allows one to turn the butterfly leaves in a circle. I kept it simple on purpose because this is my very first movable parts book and there is plenty of room to be more ambitious with future projects.
The finished altered book is lovely to look at and fun to play with. Whether or not this work gets accepted into the juried show at 23 Sandy, it provided me with the opportunity to experiment in new ways and create work I may not have otherwise made.
Materials used: book, sewing pattern paper, Japanese paper, rubber stamp & ink, pasteboard butterflies, card stock, brass watch parts, leaf skeletons, lots of gel medium, and lots of glue.
For the past two weeks I’ve been working on a proposal to do a large scale project of altered books. I’ve never done something like this before so it’s been quite a challenge to figure out the best way to approach working with multiple books in a series. Normally I make my altered books as one-of-a-kind pieces and can spend as much as ten hours on each one. For this project I’ve had to simplify how I work with them, come up with a common theme, and develop a process I can apply to making each one.
My plan is to take twenty-five volumes of a set of Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedias and insert natural objects into a niche custom cut from the pages of each book. The book pictured here is the second one I’ve completed, and as you can see the shape I had to cut was fairly complicated. The objects I chose to work with in this piece are two seal vertebrae scavenged for me from Pebbly Beach, Bowen Island, by Anne. The bones are very beautiful and I like their odd shapes protruding from the pages like two gargoyle faces.
I was over on Bowen last weekend and spent most of a walk along the beach and forest collecting things to use for this project. I was a little worried I wouldn’t be able to come up with twenty-five different items but I came home with piles of stuff to work with.
Pictured here are crab bits, drift wood, oyster mushrooms, a pine cone, lichen, seaweed, and bones from a deer. (I had to scrounge through decaying remains to collect those, which is not for everyone).
I’ll reveal more about this project in coming weeks. For now I’m counting down as I work my way through the twenty-five volumes. As of today there are twenty-two more to go.
Last week I began exploring the idea of creating books with pop-ups and movable parts. I was inspired by an artist call for submissions and decided to use this as an excuse to push even further the creative possibilities of my altered books. My first step was to go to Chapters and start looking at pop-up books in the children’s section to get a feel for how these things are constructed. I was really blown away by some of the books I found. [1][2][3]
I ended up purchasing Paper Engineering and Pop-ups for Dummies because it seemed to be an excellent resource for the kind of information I was looking for. None of the sample projects involve incorporating the techniques into existing books but they will help develop my own ideas.
So far I’ve been experimenting using the projects in the book as a jumping off point, and I’m trying to focus on learning the technique rather than trying to produce a finished product. The above two photos are of two pop-up cards I created using cardstock. I came up with my own design rather than following the instructions because I really didn’t want to make a pop-up card with hearts. I kept things simple though and made sure not to worry about what I was making. It’s important to “let go” when experimenting.
This airplane card is my first attempt at creating a pull mechanism, and again I was modifying the idea to suit my own purposes while learning the technique. It’s fascinating learning how to create a mechanism out of paper because it is way more complex on the inside than the simple movement of pulling the tab on the outside would imply.
This 3-D paper pop-up of a lotus flower is a design I came across online as a video demonstration. It looks really beautiful and complicated, but it’s actually very simple and made from a single piece of paper.
Next up, exploring more techniques and translating what I learn into creating an altered book with found objects and moving parts.