Threefold 15
a silk scarf, paper weaving, and reflecting on Printopia
Welcome to the Threefold Letter. This month: celebrating my Nana’s 90th, making a botanical paper anthology page; and my prints at Printopia
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My Nana turned 90 at the weekend. It is her first birthday in her brand-new house, which she moved into two nights before her birthday. It was a family reunion of sorts, with high tea, speeches and gifts.
I made her a silk scarf: hand sewn and bundle-dyed with onion skins my mum amassed, marigolds I grew, and simmered in a turmeric dyebath. The turmeric is fugitive, but it gives a bright glow that can be replenished annually.
I’ve done a lot of gathering in my Nana’s garden; I learned everything I knew about sewing from her; and my first forays into bundle-dyeing were done in her kitchen. It felt fitting to make this for her.
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The Association of Book Crafts (ABC) is holding a Print & Bind project – 15 printers contribute 30 copies of a printed page, and 15 bookbinders each bind two books. The bookbinder keeps one and sends the other back to one of the printers. It’s a fun collaborative project, and some of the books will be on display as part of the BIND25 conference. This year’s Print & Bind project is themed ‘Botanicals’
I chose to print an Emily Dickinson excerpt “Here is a little forest, / Whose leaf is ever green; / Here is a brighter garden, / Where not a frost has been.” I imagine our book collaboration is itself a little forest. It will be a garden as such, a grouping or collection of writings and artwork, likely a bouquet of botanicals: an anthology. Anthology comes from the Greek for flower, anthos, plus the suffix -logia, a collection, from the Latin, legein, to gather.
The pages are A4 and are intended to be folded for an A5 book. The recto sides are printed. My contribution is its own collection of plants. The second recto page has been printed with grasses collected along the path at Nihotupu dam. Woven into the commercially recycled paper, is my own handmade paper dyed with tanekaha or made with onion skins and corn husk.
The paper weaving on this project is very straightforward due to the timeline and the edition of 30, but I have been experimenting with different compositions and patterns too. I’ll find a project for those soon.
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Printopia just gets better and better. It is the coming together of a creative community. At the end of the weekend, I felt buoyed and filled with a new sense of purpose for my own creative makings. I had included four letterpress / text based prints on fabric hangings I had produced at the very beginning of my MVA. They were just tests that I had barely shared with anyone outside of studio. But these prints had the warmest responses and I sold three of them! The time is now for image and text / the image of text / poetry off the page.
Please excuse the lighting in these photos: it’s strangely tinged in the corban estate shed2.
