ABCD April 2024

Seven members of Artists’ Book Club Dove met in the print studio on a beautiful sunny day when the cowslips were in flower. Yes, those are orchid leaves in the foreground (below) – but which orchid? Common spotted is my guess.

Bron showed us a beautiful book by Alec Finlay, Mesostic Remedy, mesostic poems on the names and functions of the Bach flower remedies. I met Alec Finlay at the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness, Orkney in June 2008. At that time he was writing three-line poems on the blades of wind turbines, a form of circle-poem that works well with the kinetics of turbines. I remember that he talked about mesostics too (a variation on the acrostic poem) and that I wrote a mesostic on the bus back to Kirkwall, where I was staying at the Youth Hostel. Alec’s book is beautifully paced. It has plenty of white space around the drawings and poems. You read it slowly and carefully. It is a reminder that a page does not have to be filled!

Diana had brought a “Spider” binding, a structure she is willing to teach us at a future meeting. Very useful for holding rather bulky insertions. See page 137 of Art of the Fold by Hedi Kyle and her daughter Ulla Warchol.

Jane has been sorting through great quantities of indigo-dyed papers and producing some striking collages. Perhaps they will turn into a book, perhaps not!

Clare brought a book she made some years ago, about a Welsh slate fence. It uses collage, the topic of our work this afternoon. It has only one page, but what a page! It is a line of upright slates. On the back of each slate, one tercet of a poem. A window cut in the front cover gives a view of the slate fence and the Welsh mountains behind it. Simply stunning. (Clare’s photos)

Pauline brought photos of the gallery space in Appledore where we’ll be exhibiting our work later this year. I’ll post photos of the finished work after this show and the one in Somerton.
Judy has been solving a problem posed by her massive map-book.
I (Ama) have made a book with many pockets to hold the bucket-list suggestions from the guests at (daughter) Mary and (son-in-law) Jan’s wedding. It’s an unruly book, unlikely to behave nicely on a bookshelf between other, more sober, volumes. The bookcloth was left over from binding Fraser’s Sermons, and the images on the cover were left over from making the wedding invitations. The sewing is a single-sheet Coptic, the pages being folded at the fore-edge. I no longer have the book, but here are some photos.

After a sumptuous shared lunch and a visit to the tree plantation and the cowslips, we spent a playful afternoon collaging random pages, to be collated and bound later. Here are my papers, including indigo-dyed, paste-patterned and handmade, and bits of old hydrographic charts. And a couple of pages in progress. One of them includes a piece of indigo-dyed jute ribbon.

Next meeting 25th May.

Here are the edited highlights from my notebook:
April Dove-droppings

fly in and fly out
shoulder to shoulder
joined in the middle

a ropey old bit of card
does have a life of its own
it’s all about stuff

look through the front cover
the more you look the more you find
the range of colour you can get

those four mermaids
trapped for hundreds of years
at the top of the tower

take them on bicycles
following connections
out to sea

women came to dance
in the back of my mind
to wind you up

a drone would be essential
find a jump-off point
another way in

a way to make a book
make and discard
like a sculpture

a pond
seeds of love
but not yet

because it can change
live with the pages
shunt them around

make holes
start with the paper
suminagashi in puddles

the postman painted every day
walking in the pine woods
fifteen miles a day

I’ve kept everything
this rather revolting book
I found in a puddle

something about the smell
something slightly damp
slightly slimy or slithery