Month: June 2019

Matchbook number eight

Sarah_Grace

Wayanad is a particularly beautiful and fertile part of Kerala. Whilst there I visited a bamboo workshop where some beautiful products were being created everything from blinds and matting to braclets and pens. As a maker myself I really enjoyed watching the ladies at work and even had a go myself stripping the bamboo with a very sharp knife! Whilst there I couldn’t help but notice lots of delicate little curls of discarded bamboo on the floor. I collected some and used them to make a cyanotype print a few days later. I also collected some beautiful leaf skeletons and some random scraps of paper.

I used a zine fold for the cyanotype print so I didn’t have to chop it about too much and used the long and elegant leaf print as a wrap around cover for the book. My aim was simply to make something beautiful to echo the beautiful work I saw going on there. It always suprises and delights me when a book kind of makes its own shapes once I’ve made it, things I never envisaged in the first place! This was definitly one of those.

Finally I used the receipt for the little things made from bamboo I bought in the shop as the cover for the matchbox/draw the book lives in and kept the tiniest little curl to live with the book in the matchbox.

Matchbook number seven

Sarah_Grace

This next little book was one of the first ones that germinated in my head whilst away. On a long windy drive up a mountain in Kerala we stopped to admire the view and encountered several monkeys. They stole the spot light from the view with their cheeky little characters! I knew then I would draw them. At the same time under my feet I spotted this matchbox and a piece of material a bit trodden into the dirt. Once washed it turned out to be quite lovely and has become the cover for the book and the box. It is also the material used for the cyanotype print in the previous post.

The background for the monkeys is a cyanotype print of foliage made in India but it didn’t take as well as I had hoped. However it is perfect as a background… as I used to always tell my students about their work ‘never throw anything away’ you never know when it might be useful.

The only other material used for this book is a page from an exercise book I bought the same day. I love paper and try to keep an eye out for paper that is used in everyday tasks. Something with marks of some kind is always interesting and adds an extra dimension to the work created with it.

I hope I have done these little creatures justice and it’s a great memory all packaged in a tiny box.

Matchbook number six

Sarah_Grace

This book was inspired by a trip to the Gandhi Memorial Museum in Madurai.  On a previous trip to India I had visited the Gandhi Museum in Mumbi called Mani Bhavan. As a child my dad used to talk about Gandhi often I think he was something of a hero for him and he made sure we kids knew all about his life and what he had achieved. My dad was a pacifist and I think saw many commonalities of ethos and conflict resolution. So now on two occassions I have been fortunate to visit places this man had been or lived and learnt about his life first hand. Both times I have found it moving and had a sense of my dad over my shoulder telling stories of this great man of peace.

The start to this book was a receipt I collected when I donated some money to be able to take photos inside the museum. I didn’t want to chop this up to much so used a modified zine fold to create a little book that still has the ability to open out to become one sheet again and at the same time creates the accordion fold to hold the rest of the sections together. From there I created two more zine fold books from a ten rupee note. I thought long and hard about using actual money as a book (I’ve been toying with the idea for a long time). I feel that Gandhi would have disapproved because although to me as a westerner this note is worth the equivalent of about twelve pence to many people in India it could be a meal. To a great extent it felt quite frivolous to cut it up, but I felt on this occasion it was warrented. It symbolises the struggle for fair wages and prices for cotton and the fact that it bares the face of Gandhi goes to show how important he is to this country.

The cyanotype prints used were made by a piece of fabric I found on my journey and the detail of the weave reminded me of the simple cloth that Gandhi chose to wear, some of which was on display in the museum. I had a little bit of the original receipt left over so made a second zine fold book covered with more cyanotype print. The matchbox used was found in Madurai and seemed appropriete with the symbol of a light bulb on the front. Gandhi was most definitely a light for India.

With this book, as often happens, it has become a tiny sculpture as much as a book. I love how many shapes it can make just by opening it in different ways. This one more than most!

Matchbook number five

Sarah_Grace

 Matchbook number five was actually a concept that came to me very quickly and seemed quite an ovbvious thing to do. It is created from a collection of receipts aquired after an evening meal in Madurai up on the roof of a lovely resturant. The food had been great as was the company and being on the roof gave the whole evening a rather lovely ambience so I wanted to create something to remember that evening. I had previously played with the round stamp the resturant use on each reciept and used a flower fold (instructions in a previous post find it here) to see how it looked. It worked very well and I liked the idea of little bits of information about the meal being hidden in each little folded square of paper. I cut out thirteen little identical squares making sure each one contained some piece of information about the meal i.e. time, date, choice of food, drinks and snipets of the address. There were thirteen because there were thirteen of us eating dinner together. Then it was a simple case of creating a structure with my thirteen little bits.

I am particularly please by the vesitility of this one. It can become all sorts of different shapes depending on how you open it up. I get a tad over excited at how a small little thing in a matchbox can fold out to create so many forms, it REALLY pleases me! I could fiddle with this for hours. As you explore the structure you glean little snippets of information about the evening and it builds up a picture of an event. For this one the matchbox draw was lined with some of a local newspaper from that day and I left thirteen of the waxmatches in the box that were in there when I found it.

Matchbook number four

Sarah_Grace

For me this little book is a real treasure. All the pieces that made it were found on the ground literally in the dirt at a local morning market somewhere on the road from Mahabalipuram to Puducherry. The fabric was all twisted around and had clearly been used as a lead for a cow and disgarded, maybe when the cow had been sold? I saw a glimpse of gold picked it up and shoved it in my bag. It wasn’t until later back in my room I unravelled it and washed it thoroughly to discover it was an incredibly beautiful section of a sari. Most of it now dangles in my flat with a large bell attached that I bought from the same market.

On the same twisted cow lead was some red and white gingham and some yellow and pink plastic threads…it really was quite a find. I also discovered one side of an A4 book cover which was very battered but a lovely turquoise colour with some great images on it, some tickets and a little scrap of note paper.

I took some of the book cover to make a little draw for the matchbox as it didn’t have one anymore. I also used this material as my book cover which holds a selection of the fabric and paper stitched in valley folds to create a semetrical look. I used some extra gingham and sari fabric to line the box and strengthen the valley folds after I had stitched the little pieces in. I love how this became such a beautiful little memory and it really brings to life the frase ‘beauty from ashes’ at least I think so!