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.
