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Bookbinding

June 1, 2011 //

Spent the day at the NUCA drawing workshop with Sarah making books. I just could not get my head around how you sew the signatures together. A number of helpful diagrams have swum before my eyes recently. I cut the signatures at home and I was all ready to go. Once Sarah had shown me what to do I was away, more or less. I made one A4 sketchbook with a pretty wildly bright blue wipe clean cover, an orange ribbon and some flower wrapping paper from Paperchase as end papers. It looks pretty good. Whilst that was drying I sewed 15 signatures of varied paper together to make a random A5 book. I glued on the scrim when I got home.

The idea was to make a couple of demonstrations of hand made learning journals for the summer school; the ultimately customised learning journal. What would it be like of the whole book was randomly papered with graph paper, cartridge and dotted paper and so on? Difficult to make an A4 book like that though I could have a go at a pretty random book with the varied papers we have lying around at school. Would that affect what you did in the book? Would this affect how you feel about the book?

I tried not to be too precious about it all. I can see that one could get carried away with it and then never want to actually make a mark in the beautifully crafted object. My two today were pretty rough really. Look OK from a distance and once they are full of collage and cuttings and photos they should look good. The random one I want to draw in straight away and I haven’t put the boards on yet.

How about making a book in leaves and then binding it together later? Sarah suggested a Japanese side stitch technique.

We also discussed gold leafing a plate. I have some not real gold leaf from Great Art but I realise that I don’t have much clue on how to use it. I want to make a gold leaf plate.

Categories Art practice, Demonstrations, Learning Journal

Glaze Firing

May 30, 2011 //

Before leaving school on Friday I emptied the kiln of its glazed contents. Some very fine examples of heavily oxided plates under green glazes. Very pleasing. Some cracks here and there but pretty interesting results.

The old paint cupboard is stacked with plates ready for a biscuit firing next week when we return from half term. Altogether there are about sixty plates in the boxes and on the shelves. The aim of a hundred seems possible, just about. Stopping the project at that point having made one piece of work called ‘One Hundred Plates About Art Teaching’ seems about right. All I have to do is find somewhere to put it.

I got some ceramic paints from Great Art on Friday so I can paint some blanks up over the half term ready for glazing and this will get the score up further. Quantity is a quality, as Lenin had it.

Finished off the big red sketchbook yesterday. This is an 80 page German sketchbook from Great Art which has become something of a beast to carry about. It has been tough though and has taken a lot of punishment over the six weeks of use. Obviously, it has to carry on taking abuse as it gets worked over and used as an example on the summer school at SARU. The next book is the same sort of book in black and I am going up to NUCA on Wednesday to try to custom make one as an example. This seems to be the ultimate learning journal; one you design and build yourself. Whether I can make it as tough as these fantastic German books I don’t know. Should be prettier though.

Categories Art practice, Ceramics, Learning Journal

Drawing Maps of Ideas

May 5, 2011 //

Not much time to work on any plates today due to other commitments and having to administer maths test which took me out of the art room. I did have time to work on a ‘mind map’ of ideas about how one becomes an art teacher whilst the children sweated over their tests.

Or how this art teacher became one anyway. One of the themes in the work, quite a difficult theme to get across really, is the blind alley, the inappropriate model, the lack of a mentor, the poor advice that can have quite an effect on ones progress through all of this. There are so many people who have very fixed ideas about what they mean about ‘standards’ and ‘skills’ in art that their advice can have a deleterious effect on the young artist. Not to mention the ‘common sense’ views of art that plague one as one is growing up and that are still heard with amazing regularity, in Lowestoft anyway.

It is a testament to the ineffectiveness of decades of art teaching that so many people still hold the view that it ain’t a proper picture if you can’t tell what it is. This is in contrast to the millions who pack Tate Modern and the whole idea of building galleries in godforsaken towns to magically regenerate them. Is this generational? Or is it class based?

But, whatever the ins and outs of all that is, the main point as far as this is concerned is the act of making the maps of influences and tracks of progress or not. Learning journeys tend to be presented as an onward march of progress towards whatever happy, sunny upland the learner currently views the world from but that isn’t the case at all. Well, not for this learner. We are talking here about years of wasted time making paintings that were no use to anyone. Unsold and unloved things. One of the problems students have with the notion of the ‘reflective learner’ is negotiating with the idea that their honest reflections are assessment suicide if they own up to not getting it.

Thinking about ‘not getting it’ or not being told what it was to get and so on made me think more about the people who had been there along the way and I start thinking there’s a plate in that and another one in that. What is a plate about Roger Dean going to look like? Pretty far out, I should think. That wouldn’t have occurred to me without the mapping exercise. The process excavates ideas.

The kiln cooled down this morning and Shirley got a set of plates out. They looked pretty good. I’ll photograph them all tomorrow.

Categories Art practice, Ceramics, Demonstrations, Learning Journal
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