The other side

Last week was taken up with an all out effort to finish the reverse side of my book 'Watershed Journey'.
Originally the book was conceived in terms of having a blank back side so to speak, or to be more honest I just hadn't really thought about the back.

The whole thing was an experiment, which might have gone wrong at any stage and in fact at one point I got stuck and had to cut off two pages! So it was a surprise to find myself using this work for the exhibition invite card.

Then we decided to display the book on a plinth, to be viewed from all sides, so I knew I had to continue the journey on the reverse.  These photos show various stages in the making. Temporarily I blu tack the collage pieces into position, thus allowing for changes of mind as things go on.  When I'm happy with the relationship between all the images I laboriously peel it all off page by page and glue permanently. Quite a fiddly process, and sometimes a page gets a last minute reorganisation.

I don't know how the stylistic aesthetic of 1950s textiles/wallpaper has crept in.  My vision of the linear fields of rushes have just made it that way.

Eventually my studio space becomes a nightmare of heaps of ripped up paper which has to be searched through to find that elusive perfect little strip...