Tag: paper

scanned images and text

In a continuation of what I wrote about here I’ve been scanning the paper that I’ve added images and text to. I’m going to add more layers of text and image to these pages then scan and print them again. Below are some of the scans. I like the way they look, I like the layers, I like the grid paper and the textures that are captured.

experimenting with images and text, book making, layers of meaning

I’m continuing to experiment with putting/printing my photos onto paper and adding handwritten text. I’m going to scan the pages, print them, add more layers of images and text, scan them again, print them again, see what that does. I’m going to try printing directly onto grid or lined paper from from notebooks like the one below, instead of just onto regular white copy paper. I want to create a book to present images of most of the self-portraits from this project, along with the text taken from the OnlyFans captions.

I like taking the captions and writing them by hand, breaking them up and singling out certain words or building upon them with new words. I’ve also been physically cutting up some of the paper that I’ve written text on to, which distorts things a little and offers additional layers of meaning. I like the physical element of this way of making. As in, I could create layers of text/images digitally but I like doing it by hand, the writing and cutting up and scanning and printing.

I’m moving to London

I’m going to live in London for a while. I spontaneously applied for a two year UK visa and it was approved surprisingly quickly and I booked a flight to London for July and then I resigned from my job. I’ve been in a daze for weeks, too tired to function. Thinking about acceptance, selfishness, sacrifice, serendipity, foolishness, fate, ambition, self-awareness. Feel like walls are closing in on me but also collapsing at the same time. Whatever happens was always inevitable. I’ve never had access to a lot of physical space to make and store work and now that I’m only able to take a small amount of things with me to London I have had to adjust things even further until I leave. I’ve been making art works with small pieces of paper and in my imagination. I’m writing a lot, typing and writing words on paper. I want to write on huge pieces of paper but I’m keeping them small for now. Years ago when something very bad happened to me, I soothed myself with the mantra: “if very bad things can happen to me unexpectedly, then very good things can happen to me unexpectedly too.” Things are always moving around, changing, I barely recognise myself but there is also no other way that things could have been.

Sermon on the Body book progress

I decided to use plastic covers for the pages of Sermon on the Body, instead of hole-punching the paper and clipping the paper directly into the binder. I prefer the way it looks and it makes it easier to turn the pages. I found a big stack of plastic covers in my mother’s house that she isn’t going to use for anything so I’m using those to avoid purchasing new ones.

I’ve been enjoying experimenting with pushing the diary and scrapbooking aesthetics into a slightly elevated (I don’t know what the best word to describe it is) place. When decorating each page of the book I feel drawn to the actions of sticking, covering, wrapping, tying, attaching and layering. And doing these things in a way where I’m not trying to disguise them. For example, the visible tape when sticking down a ribbon. Making this book is quite therapeutic and I think part of that is because I’m allowing it to display it’s artifice. I love the way it looks to make a bow out of ribbon and stick it to paper with crude bits of tape, so I am just doing it, rather than forcing it to be beautiful in a more conventional or polished way. This brings me a lot of relief. Maybe because my usual focus is taking photos of myself and it gets quite exhausting always thinking about what I look like and moving my body around in uncomfortable ways to make a photo look good or interesting.

Last year I started doing some very vague experiments with altering objects related to weddings (flowers, veil etc.) and those experiments are now informing this book (and my project overall). I don’t know exactly why but I became really interested in wrapping and covering things with plastic. I wrapped some fake roses with plastic from some packaging. I taped up a rip in a second-hand wedding veil with duct tape. It felt really satisfying to me and I’m enjoying exploring it further now.

I think allowing the artifice of the book’s construction to be so obvious makes sense with the poetic content because it increases or points to the vulnerability of the work. The writing is essentially a diary of one year in my life, I wrote it in poetic text mostly to protect myself from feeling too vulnerable (during the actual writing process and if anyone were to ever read it, which now they can).

book art workshop with Rosie Sherwood

I was looking forward to this workshop as I’m planning to make some books of my poems. It was really helpful.

Some notes and thoughts:

  • Is the structure of the book part of the meaning of the book? If the structure was different would the meaning of the book change?
  • One of the poems that I would like to turn into a book was written over the course of one year. I contributed at least one line to poem each day for 365 days. So during the workshop I thought about how the structure of the book might connect with how the poem was written. I thought about diary and calendar formats, using these formats as some kind of starting point/inspiration.
  • Rosie talked about the idea of “book” and how broad the definition of “what is book” can be… “bound together in some way”. To me this was quite moving to think about, the expansiveness.
  • I’m thinking about the difference between making a book that is a one of a kind art object versus a book that can be replicated into multiple copies. I would like to try both but right now I’m more interested in making a one of a kind art object, something that I would view as a sculptural object to be used in an installation.
  • I liked learning the basic folding and stitching techniques. Right away I wanted to experiment, fold things in different ways, create asymmetrical edges on the paper.