A different way to approach thinking and making
The idea was born from a peculiar Instagram phenomenon in which makers feels the urge to post at least one picture of their paper offcuts, sharing their innate beauty and incredible potential, but rarely exploring it further. As Martina Margetts[1] wrote:
“Today’s internet deprives us of a connection with things: obsessed by surfing images, we consume superficially and judge prejudicially.” [2]
It is not enough for me to make useful objects. My aim as a bookbinder, artist and maker is to understand, deconstruct and reveal the physical nuances of my favourite medium: the book.
I started to collect offcuts because I felt that some of them were much more than merely the residues of processes. The simple act of accumulation led me to see them as a new raw material to be explored and used in different ways.
At the same time, I was inspired by Gongshi – spirit stones (popularly mistranslated as Scholar’s Rocks in English) after I worked on the seminal publication Crags and Ravines Make a Marvellous View published by Sylph Edition. In China, in the middle period of the Tang dynasty, during the first half of the 9th century BC, an enthusiasm for rocks developed in Chinese culture which gradually spread to Japan and Korea, and has continued to the modern age.
Rocks are venerated with all the respect that we would accord a work of art; except that what is really being honoured is the power of nature rather than the human hand. In a similar manner I started collecting urban debris from all around my studio, an area with an ever-increasing rate of development. By recasting the construction debris, I detached them from their past and gave them a new life, a new perspective through which to be seen. The appreciation of these objects, being man-made, becomes a starting point for reflecting on the power of creation and destruction contained within human hands.
I crystallised this current idea by creating a series of four new sculptures that explore the complex relationship between process and outcome, utilising the ‘in-between’ materials to capture nuances of the process that are otherwise invisible. At the same time, I wanted to create a departure from the linear narrative of binding a book – an object that itself is inherently linear – by developing a new visual language rooted in its physicality.
Daily Practice is now exhibited at “The Art of the Exceptional’ WOOD-GLASS-PAPER hosted by Fortnum and Mason on the third floor of their Piccadilly store until the 8th of May 2022.
[1] Martina Margetts is a Senior Tutor of Critical and Historical Studies at the Royal College of Art in London. She was Editor of Crafts magazine, and has curated a number of exhibitions for Britian's Crafts Council.
[2] Documents on Contemporary Crafts No.5, Material Perceptions published by Norwegian Crafts Arnoldsche Art Publishers, 2018