Done!

The book fair is done! It was a wonderful weekend and plenty of people turned up and purchased some amazing things. I set out to buy Christmas presents and actually just bought myself a lot of stuff (all for research etc obviously!).



It seems that everyone enjoyed themselves and that the book fair will become an annual event. Next year we will try to clash less with Manchester so people can face coming to the northwest for both! Perhaps early December.... Tables will be advertised next summer as will at least two commissions to produce new bookworks (depending on funding of course - there may be more!). This year we approached artists with commissions for new work, but next year we will be making this an open submission. If you would like to be kept informed please email events@wolstenholmeprojects with your name and details.



A massive thanks to everyone who helped over the weekend, especially Karen, Sue and Lauren, who kept everyone full of tea and cake. Thanks also to all of the table holders who made for a very nice atmosphere and hopefully met some interesting people. Last, but not least, thanks to Mary Yacoob and Sophie Loss for their phenomenal effort in bringing Wrapped and Encased - an exhibition of envelope based works to Wolstenholme Projects for the weekend. More on this with some images of work later.

Images in this post are kindly provided by Sarra Facey and more can be viewed here: http://seen.ibidem.co.uk/artistsbookfair/

Emily +

Wrapped and Encased: an exhibition of envelopes as containers and messengers curated by Sophie Loss and Mary Yacoob

This exhibition was at the entrance to the book fair and contained the works of over 50 artists who responded to an open call of the theme. The curation of the exhibition took a very considered and sensitive approach to these often slight but fascinating pieces, allowing the viewer to move between the works at their own pace.

Performances took place within the exhibition by Sara Dell Onze and a drawing work by Jane Grisewood and Carali McCall.

Video of the exhibition edited by Sara Dell Onze

http://www.sophieloss.com/
http://www.mary-yacoob.com/
http://www.am-bruno.blogspot.com/


Images below are all used with the kind permission of Barry Hobson, one of the artists in Wrapped and Encased. More images of the exhibition can be viewed at:
http://wrapped-encased-liverpool08.blogspot.com/

Commissions 2008: Rose Smith

Rose Smith made a multiple work in an edition of 30.
The Secret Projects: Liverpool Pennies was made up of a small envelope containing objects for your perusal (I don't want to give too much away here!). Each multiple also contains a secret compartment with a special present for you.

Rose also brought with her to the bookfair a variety of engraved pennies, some making the Queen considerably more decorated and others with text and gleeful defacings. On Sunday night after the bookfair I had the pleasure of helping Rose scatter 100 engraved pennies through Liverpool - so keep your eye out for something special on the street!!

The Secret Projects: Liverpool Pennies can be bought by contacting events@wolstenholmeprojects.org

Commissions 2008: Elizabeth Willow

Elizabeth Willow produced an inkjet printed book

The Birds of the British Isles and Their Eggs: A Small Collection of Tales

comprising stories and drawings about the yearning to fly by the artist, printed in an edition of 49.

During the book fair weekend, Elizabeth did hourly readings from the book and people scooted up on cushions and teeny stools to listen in - it was like being 5 again. The books is priced at £14 and can be bought by contacting events@wolstenholmeprojects.org.

Questions?

events@wolstenholmeprojects.org

Emily Speed - 07970 212 176

Tim Machin

Tim Machin studied at the Ruskin School of Fine Art, University of Oxford (1996-1999) and Wimbledon School of Art (2001-2002). Shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing Prize (2001) and Becks Futures (2006), he won the Aspex Emergency2 prize and had a solo exhibtion at the Portsmouth-based gallery in 2007.

Tim Machin is represented by

How to find us

Wolstenholme Projects is just off the main shopping streets in Liverpool and between FACT and The Bluecoat. A map of the venue with some other useful places can be found HERE.

Almost here...

The Artists' Book Fair is almost here and we are very excited here at Wolstenholme Projects about the amount and quality of artists coming to Liverpool for the event.

We will be open
12 - 5 Saturday 15th November
and
11 - 4 Sunday 16th November

There will be performances taking place from 12 midday on Sunday.
Tea, cake, proper coffee and a friendly atmosphere also on offer.

Any questions about anything? Emily Speed - 07970 212 176 or email events@wolstenholmeprojects.org

Rose Smith

Rose Smith takes glee in finding everyday, 'pick-up-able' objects and changing them in subtle, subversive ways. By altering the objects (coins, sunglasses, inhalers, packaging) she hopes to give them a second life and allow their value or form to be reconsidered by those who find them.

The sunglasses shown here were part of a series of info-glasses left on park benches around Alexander Palace Boating Lake, each etched with historical or geographical facts about the lake itself.

New work will be made for the Liverpool Artists Book Fair, to include an edition of a new miniature multiple with accompanying bookwork

Tamarin Norwood

Tamarin Norwood uses language and objects to articulate the gap between the familiar and the unknown. Informed by her training in linguistics and translation, her works close in on this gap by disrupting their own narratives – videos with mismatched subtitles; translations that don't quite reach; books that neither begin or end; objects that look somehow out of place; lectures that refuse to make proper sense. Tamarin's work plays at keeping a distance while coaxing the viewer to delve inside and explore.
www.tamarinnorwood.co.uk
www.homologue.wordpress.com
tamarin@kulturfabric.org

Jane Grisewood and Carali McCall

Performance work on Sunday 16th November from 12.00

‘Line Dialogues’ is a series of collaborative live performance drawings that explores notions of mark making, repetition and process. Grisewood and McCall, both research students in London at Central St Martins College of Art and Design, create large wall and floor drawings of different durations, marking time and challenging endurance, while responding to the mood, sounds and architecture of the space.

Laura Robertson

An exhibition of envelopes as containers and messengers. Curated by Sophie Loss and Mary Yacoob

Envelopes >>> evocative objects >>> containers, messengers, witnesses >>> they hide and disclose >>> hint at communication >>> secret networks and allusions >>> postal system >>> icons on mobile phones >>> their content invisible >>> symbol for the pre internet era.

This is a group show presenting an installation housed in a gallery space. The gallery has been remodelled into domestic setting which acts as a container for envelopes and their insides. The artists selected for this show examine the formal aspect and the conceptual possibilities of the medium. The multiplicity of directions explored by individual artists reflects their practices and creates a whole which is complex, textured and fun.

Veronica Perez Karleson, Untitled, Chinese ink and white pen on envelope, 16cm x 23cm, 2008

15:1 Exhibition, curated by Sumi Perera

15: 1 is an exhibition of fifteen artists' books by Chinese students from the CAFA (Central Academy of Fine Art) in Beijing.

Image: Recycle by Wang Shunshun.

Amy Jo Nolan

Amy Jo's work focuses on Royal Mail, in particular envelopes and postage marks. This project started along time ago when she first came to university and her mum started sending her weird and wonderful parcels. Amy Jo's work has developed and she is now looking very closely at envelopes and all their small details.

Tracey Eastham

Tracey is a fairly new member of Wolstenholme Projects and has been commissioned to make and exhibit a new paper collage work for the Artists' Book Fair

Ian Abbott

Ian is a book artist working in Southport. Currently engaged with 'Echo' (miniature book) the third of his four word tetralogy, which includes 'Jump' (traditional) and 'Slow' (Japanese stab). Ian is interested in metamorphs, paper engineering and has initiated several mail art projects with different groups across the US and Europe.

Ailie Rutherford

Drawing on Dreams

I have been keeping diaries of my dreams for a long time.

Recently I have begun to teach myself to draw in a hypnagogic state, keeping a notebook beside my pillow. I’d been reading Sigmund Freud’s "On Dreams" and fallen asleep while reading. In a semi-awake state I picked up my pencil and notebook to sketch, discovering later that I’d drawn on Freud’s book instead.

Since then I have been using the book as my diary, drawing onto the pages each day, the drawings having an arbitrary relationship to the text.

Elizabeth Willow

Elizabeth Willow frequently makes use of found objects both natural and unnatural, pursuing a fascination with objects that have a story (whether known or imagined) with fragments, broken and discarded objects. Her work often involves an element of contradiction which is expressed in various ways, through the use of materials which have seemingly incongruent qualities such as strength and delicacy, through the creation of objects whose properties defy their function, or through the attempt to exploit or subvert the tension between such opposing aspects or forces as attraction and repulsion, secrecy and spectacle, freedom and constraint, the supposed imaginary and the purportedly real.

Elizabeth Willow has been commissioned to produce a new bookwork for Artists' Book Fair Liverpool, containing her beautiful and sometimes tragic short stories about the desire to fly.

Emily Speed

Emily is interested in buildings and in the way that architecture can act as a metaphor for our internal selves (the body as a building that houses the mind). Her work is concerned with the enduring sense of memory and/or personal identity that is often embedded into or linked with built space.

Wirral Metropolitan College

BA Fine Art Course

Working with the artists’ book format has given both students and staff the opportunity to imaginatively engage with the meaning and context of the book form.

Our responses encompass a wide range of approaches reflecting the diverse preoccupations and methodologies in our individual practices.

Image: Louise Tett 'Falling In'

Leila Shetty

peach-tree pear-tree press

More info coming soon..

contact: peachtreepeartree@gmail.com

Gill Smith

Gill Smith is an illustrator working in Liverpool.
Her work uses found fragments of text as a starting point to create her personal visual narratives. The stories usually evolve from notes and drawings made in sketchbooks. In a way Gill's hand made books are refined versions of her personal sketchbooks.
website address to follow soon.

website: http://www.flickr.com/photos/22861314@N05/

Contents May Vary

Contents May Vary is a Manchester based artist collective co-founded in 2004
Alice Bradshaw - Liz Murphy - Richards Shields

CMV show collectively as well as individually and also organise large scale exhibitions inviting other artists to participate. They find new and challenging ways to exhibit with particular focus on site-responsivity to non-conventional and everyday spaces. Additionally, CMV run an independent free-of-charge publication with international distribution.

Sumi Perera

Sumi Perera’s artist's books (SuperPress) are an amalgam of influences of her work in the East (Sri Lanka, her native country), and the West (the United Kingdom, her adoptive country) as a doctor, scientist and artist. Slight variations on the theme are used to generate 'unique multiples', whilst blurring boundaries between the artist/artisan, orient/occident and the past and present. Process is as important as the ‘finished’ article, often instructing the viewer/reader to intervene allowing editorial control to be shared. Her work has won several international awards and is held in many private and public collections including the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Tate.

Daryl Waller

Daryl has been living in London and working as an artist since graduating in 2003. He has shown his work frequently in Cornwall and London and has also exhibited internationally with the West Germany Gallery in Berlin and the Tart Gallery in San Fransisco. Daryl is nomadic with his choice of medium, working predominantly with painting and drawing, but also makes video based work and artists' books.

website: www.winterdrawings.com

Claire Cooper

Claire Cooper makes charming collaged works, all of which relate to her family and family life.

AM Bruno

AM Bruno represents current artistic thought, practice and sensibility translated and expanded into book art form. The artists in the group are visual and conceptual practitioners in all media, including painting, photography, video, performance and sculpture.

The themes vary from: enquiry into the nature of books/sketchbooks; human body/desire/private life; the value of artificiality; writing/image; and time.

AM Bruno is an alliance of 24 artists initiated by MA Fine Art graduates from Central Saint Martins.

contact: am.bruno24@googlemail.com

Sarah Morpeth

Sarah Morpeth's current work is an ongoing series of books relating to a film with which she has been obsessed for years - Powell & Pressburger's 'I know where I'm Going'. In these pieces she explores the interdependence of form and content and ways in which each can illuminate the other. She is also interested in the mechanics of reading - how we don't consciously register the turn of the page, the placing of the text and how too - while engrossed in film - we don't notice the editing, the transitions, the structural elements. Nevertheless these dramatically affect our perceptions and Sarah explores ways of highlighting such structural aspects in her work.

website: www.sarahmorpeth.com

contact: sarah_morpeth@hotmail.com

Phillip Marsden / Compromise Comics Enterprise

Compromise Comics Enterprise publishes the small-press comic book works of artist Phillip Marsden, including such titles as Clam & Elgar etc, Aesop’s Fables, Get The Look, the collaborative Blackout and a specially commissioned publication to coincide with Liverpool Biennial 08.

website: www.phillipmarsden.com

contact: phil_marsden@hotmail.com

Robert D. Davies

Robert's cards and books are drawings created from observation and fiction and exist as little universes of their own. They sometimes interlink and sometimes stop at cliff edges, or merely hint at other possible routes, as in a journey. Curiosities in a museum, or short marratives born from insignificant, fragile moments...an interplay of the absurd and the mundane, control and abandonment of control...

website: www.robertddavies.com

contact: robdavies72@yahoo.co.uk

Black and White Cat Press

The Black and White Cat Press was created by David Birchall in 2001, since then it has been drawing and producing quality handmade zines, comics, books, cds and prints.

website: www.blackandwhitecatpress.org

contact: blackandwhitecatpress@hotmail.com

Camp Yellow

Camp Yellow is a creative art club from the city of Manchester with three members; Faye Coral Johnson, Lisa Handley and Mike Redmond. They create limited edition zines and books that catalogue drawings, pictures and stories.

website: campyellow.blogspot.com

contact: mike-redmond@hotmail.com

Francis Elliott

website: www.foundrypress.co.uk

contact: foundry.press@virgin.net