Finished book art of "Wish you were hear" (my piece from the interim show)

When the interim show finished, I was left with a sizeable pile of postcards, which I knew I couldn't just bin! The book art workshop (as part of the low residency) inspired me to try and to make book art out of the cards. Given the number of pieces I was working on, and the need to get to London Victoria for paper, it took a while to get round to this, but with help from Karen D, I finally did it.

The design of this book was really a story of accepting more-and-more curation responsibility.

Originally, my goal was to try to replicate the experience of seeing the postcards at the show. As such I was planning for an unordered collection of all the cards. However, I also wanted to attach the cards to paper to preserve them, and there is no way to do this without having some form of order. Having thought a lot about folds, and the implications for the ordering/grouping of the cards, I decided to go for a simple concertina fold, and to order the cards into a progression of some form. This was my first concession to curation.

I thought a lot about how to group/order the cards. Coming at it with a bit of a Tomgos head, I decided to try to group them by topic e.g. love, sex, politics etc... This worked ok, but in some cases was quite forced, and left some very big categories. Eventually I abandoned this and decided to group them by the 'emotion expressed'. Eventually I transcribed them all into Google Sheets and came up with a workable set of emotional categories, and a logical progression.

I felt strongly that all the cards should be present, despite many of them being offensive and/or inscrutable, but I also worried about these cards being the first or last card shown. Eventually I decided to put the 'problematic' cards onto the back side of the book. This was my second concession to curation (although it was later irrelevant as we'll see).

Folding the paper for the book proved harder than I hoped - my folding was more accurate than I expected, but the sheer length meant that even slight errors in folding led to the book being 'skewy'.

Eventually I had enough pages folded decently for about 70 cards (including some space at the ends for forewords and cock-ups). With an initially heavy-heart, I selected the best 60 cards from the total set of 193. This was my third concession to curation!

I thought the process of curating would be painful, but the extremely limited space made it much easier - I ended up picking the 60 cards I couldn't bear to leave out. The order worked well, and with a bit more 'headspace' I could refine it too to make small statements and meanings.

Overall I think I told a good balanced story with the cards I chose to include. I also made sure to include ALL the cards as a text appendix at the end.

I made a very nice faux embossed cover by cutting the letters out of thin cardboard and gluing the resulting 'stencil' onto the main board, and covering with book binding cloth:

Overall I am very pleased with the book, although it's not quite as flawless as I hoped, it's good for a first attempt, and I think it does justice to the cards. I hope I can find somewhere to exhibit it so people can see it.