Currents of Nature

An art work by Canadian artist Rachael Ashe

 See more about her recent exhibition and other work she does on her blog

Kerry Miller's latest beautiful Butterfly Book Art.

Kerry uses the illustrations from the book that she is working with, and cuts, carves and sometimes colours it back into a brand new life.

Book Page Flowers

Indigenous South African flowers on the Freshly Found Blog

Soft, Ethereal and Altered

 
Beautiful, Tender, Altered Books by artist Linda Simmonds

Book Paper Art on a Box

An interpretation of the Moses Mabhida Stadium in book paper and string art.  Read more about this on Freshly Found

Italian Cross-stitcher and Paper Crafter

Vintage Birds

Nicoletta is a designer and cross-stitcher extraordinaire.  On her blog Nikys Creations, she says that it's all about Primitive cross-stitch  and more!  Well part of the more is her beautiful paper craft.

Christmas Inspiration

More Christmas with Niky

Beautiful Rose Wreath

She has lots of inspiration and Christmas ideas too!  Start planning now so that you have your decorations are ready by the end of the year.

Exactly How Books Work !

Exclusive Books lovely posting on their Facebook page

 

Book Art by Paul Sloman

Book Art byPaul Sloman

The Fox is Black have a great review of this '208-page documentation of current art, installation, and design created with and from books.' 

Jody Alexander

Some more beautiful work from Jody Alexander

  

Pop over to her website and see some more of her installations.

 

Sedimentals

Pop over to Flash of the Hand to meet Erin Fletcher's August Artist of the Month, Jody Alexander.

I am fascinated by the different page colours of creamy white, when I stack uncovered books, and so I love what she has done with them in with her beautiful stacked Sedimentals Range.
How inspiring to hear that:
"I am 100% a hand tool gal and have no heavy equipment except an old copy press that I occasionally use as a book press.  I love my bone and teflon folders, Olfa knife and scalpel and my sewing awl, and mostly make non-adhesive bindings with exposed stitching on the spine – both contemporary and historical."

 

Erin is a passionate bookbinder herself, and her  insightful interview of talented Jody is well worth a read

BestBook Exhibition at Kunstbibliothek

The Kunstbibliothek is an art library in Berlin, specialising in the literature of the history of art.  Since the 2nd of August, they have been hosting an exhibition in the foyer called Bestbooks.

"The exhibition presents various artists and the differing artistic approaches that they represent in how to conceive of the artist's book as an art form in its own right. ... The chosen artists refashion, rupture, and add to the book as a medium. For them, the book acts as a container for a carefully selected succession of sheets, with each one evolving from the other" Staatliche Museen du Berlin

Some of the artists exhibiting their work include:
Lutz Fritsch
Paul Halloran
Katharina Hinsberg
Pia Niewöhner
Norbert Prangenberg
Michel Sauer
Nora

The entrance is Free and the exhibition will run until Sun 13th October. 


Here is an video about the Kunstbibliothek

Poetry in Motion

Shop Window Book Art Installation - mentioned previously on the blog here- by The Shaw Sisters and Freshly Found.  

 Read about it on the Freshly Found Blog

 

Vintage Book Bundles

Jessica of Running with Scissors has an inspiring article on making decorative coloured book bundles

Real Book Kindle

Brian Thompson of Busted Typewriter sells these hollowed out Vintage-book Kindle-keepers!

Protects your Kindle from scratches and by disguising it, protects from theft too!

Books By the Foot

Vintage books hired out or sold for decorative puroposes by Strand, New York.  

This pic from their gallery - Oprah Magazine

Wall Sconce

Book Paper Wall Sconce - Freshly Found

7 Things You Can Do With an Encyclopaedia...

Love Jim Rosenau's suggestions!  

He is a booksmith of note.  Have a look at his This into That! online showcase!

The Speaker Book

Another one of Steve Hoefer's inventions - and he share's the secret of how it's done too! 

Steve has hidden a speaker and an amp inside a set of 3 books, cleverly disguising the source of sound.

The tutorial is on his Grathio Lab website

Book Light Tutorial

How lovely to come across a great idea for reusing vintage books in a practical and useful way.  

What's really cool is that inventor and creative problem solver, Steve Hoefer of Grathio Labs has provided an in depth tutorial on how to do it yourself!

Wim Botha at The Venice Biennale

 

South African Artist Wim Botha has prepared an incredible work of carved books for the Venice Biennale.  This major contemporary art fair began in 1895 and happens every other (odd-numbered) year. 

The show is open now and will run until the 24th November.
The Exhibition in the South African Pavilion is entitled Imaginary Fact and includes Wim's installation - Study for the Epic Mundane.
The books are bolted together, sculpted and suspended.
I love the different shades of white and cream, with the grey-black of the print showing through.

Find out much more info from 
The Daily Maverick,  
The Mail and Guardian,  
The Department of Arts and Culture and  
Artthrob

Basic Barrel Roll - Book Fold Tutorial

In response to loads of interest, we will be posting some tutorials on the art of book folding or Bibliogami. 

One of the simplest folds is the barrel roll  Start with a paperback that has a flexible glued spine. Choose a book of 200 - 250 pages.[100-125 actual sheets of paper].  Remove the outside cover.
Lay the book down flat and count 5 pages.  Roll the pages towards the spine.

Tuck them in as close to the spine as possible, then repeat with the next 5 pages and so on.  Always work in the same direction.  

Book Art Project - Before and After

First the After - We've just finished an enormous book folding project.  
Here are some of the leftover books ...

The rhythm and accordian lines make my heart sing.

And then the Before - The prototypes for the project.

Those colourful books in the background are just too beautiful to fold.
(I may write a series of posts on unwanted books that I just could not bring myself to alter :-)

I am really hoping to have some pictures to share of the completed installations in a number of stores across the country.  

The Antithesis

This post is not about paper art at all.  It's about not having paper to create with. 
I was struck by this fact when we visited the Vooortrekker monument in Pretoria last weekend. The museum at the base of the monument houses many historic day-to-day artifacts of those migrants in the early to mid 1800s.  

This black board was one of them.  Used for schooling children because of the scarcity of paper.

Some diaries and bibles on display at the museum show that writing on paper was a beautiful and intentional art. 

All of this is thought provoking, as a technological society we hint at being paperless again, but probably use more paper than ever.


The Great Trek (Afrikaans: Die Groot Trek) was an eastward and north-eastward migration away from British control in the Cape Colony during the 1830s and 1840s by Boers (Dutch/Afrikaans for 'farmers') The migrants were descended from settlers from western mainland Europe, most notably from the Netherlands, northwest Germany and French Huguenots.

In The Beginning...

When I first entered the world of book art, I thought it would last for about 2 months.  I made a trip to my local charity store and bought 3 copies of the same book.  The saleslady kindly alerted me to the fact that they were the same book, but I told her I was not going to read them, I was going to fold them!  
Ohh... Mmm...  

I did fold the books, and place them in a bowl on my coffee table.  I thought they would make a nice conversation piece, and then I would chuck them out when they got old and dusty after a month or two.
Little did I know just how many hundreds of books would be transformed because of this.
I wrote a blog post about my first attempts in May 2008 and in September of the same year, I wrote an article on the subject for Elle Decoration
Since then, my own home has been decorated with numerous versions of book art, or bibliogami as I like to call it, and I have sold book art through my Freshly Found store, and supplied the Shaw Sisters too.
I hardly read books.  I am more of a doer.  But I have grown to know and love them intimately.  The various page thicknesses, grains of paper, bendiness of spines, yellowing of pages and my favourite - the 'bookmarks' that are left behind.