The Isles at the Edge of the Sea concertina book is a departure from my regular text based handmade artist books.
I was fortunate to visit the Outer Hebrides in May 2024; a place that had been on my bucket list for some years. I had longed to experience the wild, wind-wrapped isles, with their beautiful white sandy shores, lochans and hills.
They certainly didn't disappoint! Of the ones I visited, the most appealing were North and South Uist and, I'm sure I left a piece of my heart on Benbecula.
The inspiration for a drawings and handmade books came quickly. I did look into extracting text from online guide to the Isles, but my finished writing didn't have the flow I was looking for to describe how I felt about the place. An attempt to simply use place names also fell short of the mark, leaving the written words floating over the images. I think an audio piece would have greater impact on the beautiful Gaelic names.
The initial mark-making experiments were a joy! Using charcoal, pencils, ink pen, pastels and ink, I used my memories of the land and seascapes to quickly create scenes.
The five finished eight page landscape concertina books are 80x8cm (each page 10x8cm) all hand drawn on white cartridge paper. Each book is a unique individual piece of art, with one side black and white and the other in colour. Having used charcoal and pastels, the books are quite fragile.
The images below are a selection from three of the books.
No comments:
Post a Comment