Chaos Never Dies

The theme for this month's Anthology poster was Chaos Never Dies! I was nervous about creating something that would be up all over for everyone to see. I felt better about it after I was told that it has a pretty short shelf life - a week at most. Phew!
I decided to make a collagraph for the image and would figure out the rest as and when I got the rest of the information for the poster. This ended up happening only a few days before it was due, and I threw together the type at the last minute. Oh well!

Mock up for the poster.

Glued string to a block of wood to make the collagraph.

It printed better than expected. And because I didn't coat the whole block with glue, the texture of the string printed as well!

Type.

And done! Well, they still need to be trimmed.

Watermarks Conference 2012 : Cleveland, Ohio

This year the Watermarks FDH and IAPMA joint conference was held in Cleveland, Ohio. It was great seeing all the people I had seen two years ago at the 2010 FDH conference at Arrowmont in Tennessee. This year Tim encouraged me to present my findings from my research trip to Sanganer. I decided to do a comparison to a few papermills in India. Starting with Gandhi Ashrams to Auroville Papers to Mohammed Hussain Kagzi in Sanagner. It was very well received and people were very interested in supporting the traditional papermakers.

This post has photos from the presentation as well as photos of the various demonstrations that took place at the action-packed conference.

The demos I went for were held at the Morgan Conservatory. A huge warehouse-type building, fully equipped with all sorts of papermaking equipment. They have also recently added letterpress printing and bookbinding.

Winsome Jobling's demo. There were so many people that it was hard to see. Luckily there was this mirror ball on the ceiling that made is possible to see everything that was going on - well, sort of.

Her demo was on watermaking using all sorts of materials to create marks in paper.

Large dyed handmade papers hanging from the ceiling.

She uses alot of found fabrics and underwear - which she gets from goodwill. This piece has 4 colours. A very skilled series of dips into different vats of pulp. The vats have pulp, water and a very small amount of formation aid.

Here's a plastic doily that she used to make this watermark. Just a guess, but the white was likely the last layer.

And Catherine's amazing encaustic presentation! She got everyone from uiowa enthused about encaustic.
Hopefully we will have her over for a workshop next year sometime!

The elevator at Tom Balbo Galleries. A huge freight elevator, the interior of which was designed by Julie Mclaughlin. It had crazy objects inside, including a couch you could sit on for the ride all the way up to the fifth floor.

This is the 4th floor.

This is the 2nd floor.

This might be the 4th floor again.

The 2nd floor. Bizarre collections of rare objects strewn all over. Quite amazing!

The basement.

Tom Balbo's 3-dimensional pulp paintings.

Timothy Moore's mould weaving demo was at Tom Balbo Galleries. This is what he uses to weave the laid mould surfaces. If you order a mould from him now, you would be in a waiting list 2 years long.

http://www.timothymooretools.com/

The wire straightener he uses to straighten all those wires before weaving them.

Korean Hanji used to make this beautiful piece

I still wonder how she made all these tiny holes. The shadow it cast was amazing.

Peter Thomas running the tiniest beater ever and dyeing the pulp with wine!

Presentation time!

It was pretty nerve wracking

Relief!!! I was SO glad when it was over!

And when we came back, fall had really set in

The tree outside North Hall. 

It has beautiful pink and white flowers in the spring.

Peeping Tom

This book was made for my Artists' Book Class. We had about three weeks to put it together from start of finish. It was letterpress printed using three polymer plates made according to the crease pattern based on Eric Gjerde's Origamic tessellation.

It is made to resemble an apartment building anywhere in the world where the viewer looks through tiny windows and into the lived of the various inhabitants of the apartments. The viewer can pop each of these squares or window into a 3-dimensional square.

Cutting the rubylith for the first plate to print the lightest run. What stays on the mylar, doesn't print.

Thats the Rubylith for the second run in the back

Cutting the rubylith for the third rand darkest run.

It peels off pretty easily

I cut an extra 0.5" margin on all four sides so account for any registration errors.

Plate 3 fresh out of the oven a.k.a platemaker!

A jig I used initially to help me register the proper placement of the print.

I eventually ended up cutting more paper of a different size to fix this issue.

Registering the first plate to the boxcar bases. The printed grid was a lifesaver!

Run 1

A maroon I mixed with with a lot of transparent white

Plate 2 on the press bed

Run 2

Plate 3 on the bed

Run 3

Many many registration problems!

But finally after torquing on the plate on the press bed (no easy task) it finally registered!

The colophon was printed on 10" by 10" sqaures

Colophon

Cut-outs for windows

Cut-outs post pochoir!

Testing the cut-outs to make sure they print a clear image.

Testing for pochoir on unfolded prints v/s folded prints.

Folding the grid to prep the print for the tessellation. Each side has to be folded into 32-nds

Final pochoir

A set of 3 make one book

Folding the tessellation

One page folded and pochoir-ed!

Boxed in blue case paper. The title and the images in the book have been cut-out and then stencilled using guache

The book opens out into a 3-panel accordion

Each of the flat squares or windows can be popped up!

There are a total of 27 windows to peek through

Some scenarios seem vaguely familiar :)