I decided to make a concertina book incorporating printmaking as the medium for a project about my former farm of Weston as the subject.

I thought about the history of the place and realised this could be portrayed through maps and the different styles they had taken over a very long time, together with what had been chosen to include or depict on them. The valley where the farm is situated has been steadily depopulated since the eighteenth century and many buildings have fallen into disuse, dilapidation, ruin and demolition. The stones from them were used to build dykes during the period of Improvement in the eighteenth century as enclosure came in, farms were consolidated into bigger and bigger units and rural labourers ‘cleared’ and relocated to the cities.

The topography hasn’t changed and the way of life is similar. Flora and fauna and some buildings remain. How to depict personal, subjective connection to place with historic material culture? Map making conventions are one way of doing this, reflecting cultural and political shifts over time.

I thought at first of constructing a narrative comprised of reminiscences and impressions and trying different media and colour studies – these are mostly in my physical sketchbook but this is a small selection.

I thought about how I would make the support.

I began studying maps using resources at the National Library of Scotland. These can be searched by place name and the entirety of available digitised maps appears. https://maps.nls.uk/geo/find/marker/#zoom=15&lat=55.7098&lon=-3.5217&f=1&z=1&marker=55.7099,-3.5311&from=1449&to=2001&i=188145660

The oldest is dated 1596 and I found an estate map dated 1790. From the middle of the nineteenth century Ordnance Survey began mapping. After careful consideration, I narrowed the available maps down to a provisional six and cropped them to make the farm the main focus.

I then thought about some of the sorts of things would be seen on the farm throughout the centuries, to show continuity as well as change.

After a lot of thinking about what to put in and what to leave out in relation to the overall concept, I started drawing images to put inside the book and looking through a couple of drawings I did last year that I thought would suit.

I played about with some of them digitally to remove colour, background etc to retain only the lines for etching plates.

I started making maquettes. I printed directly onto two different supports (Bristol board and buff Paint On mixed media) from my home printer and decided to have some images as inserts sewn into the valleys of the concertina.

A big influence was Drucker, J, The Century of Artists’ Books (Granary Books, 1994). See Assessment 3.

I also began investigating book binding, looked at a lot of artists books and methods of folding. Books included the following:

• London Centre for Book Arts, Making Books (Pavilion, 2017)
• Golden, A Making Handmade Books: 100+ Bindings (Lark, 2010)
• Kyle, H and Warchol, U The Art of the Fold (Laurence King, 2018)

After I decided on the maps, Steven introduced me to a photographer’s/artist’s book by Zoe Childerley, The Debatable Lands and this was very interesting and useful. I also had a careful look at some artist’s books held by UWS Library to see the kind narratives they had created as well as inspecting closely how they had been constructed. These were by: Lesleymay Miller and Judith Rowan (Missing); Imi Maufe (Significant Train Journeys); Christine McCauley (Traces, Trails and Remnants).

I made the first maquette, printing directly onto the small square surface (A6 squared of) and stitching in a folded A4 map printed on tracing paper. I then decided the format was too small and a postcard size would in any case be more in keeping with the concept.

My inkjet printer takes only A4 maximum so I fitted four images onto one page and cut the pages horizontally to make two pages of the concertina. I researched different tapes but decided in the end to simply use masking tape for the joins.

I experimented with using an awl and bone folder and stitching in pages using three holes.

I thought initially about printing maps one on top of the other to make abstract patterns. However, without spending £20 per map to buy high resolution images from the National Library, they became too blurry to make aesthetic or conceptual sense.

A range of experiments trying out different surfaces and different media, including paint, ink and soluble graphite.

To get the drawn images onto the surface, I digitised them using a combination of the Sketchbook app and Canva (I got a month’s free trial of Canva for business which allowed me to removed backgrounds and add filters), printed them onto tracing paper and stuck them down. I then drew into some of them with ink and ink wash.

I made a number of different maquettes, with some failures in relation to how they sized and formatted. There was so much measuring and cutting involved that I bought my own rotary trimmer from Ebay.

I worked out a provisional format and layout and completed the six drawings, rejecting some and making new ones, on the basis they wouldn’t come out well (though this could have been a mistake). These are some pages from my sketchbook, questioning how this plan led from or related to earlier work.

I also experimented with monoprinting. in case I might want to monoprint instead of or as well as etch images.

I had started by wanting to insert images on a transparent surface, maybe with tracing paper but then began researching the thinnest Japanese papers that would take intaglio printing – having experimented with it in the first semester, I knew the tracing paper could not handle this without buckling. After trying a sample pack of papers, none of which were standard A4 or A5 so would not fit in my printer and having re-sized all the images to fit, I bought a 10 m roll of Washi Hosho and made the monprints above. It turned out that while my own rotary trimmer would cut it, the trimmer at Gracefield would not without damaging the paper.

I then experimented with what the images would look like if printed onto painted/monoprinted sheets by laying acetates over the top.

I then thought about making larger mixed media images to fold and sew inside the concertina.

I found the Hosho paper took watercolour very well and could also take monoprint on top, It could also folded very small and flat. I experimented with tiny velco dots to keep the page closed but it was a little bulky to then fold the concertina flat.

I decided on a change of aesthetic. I decided to make solar plate prints on a Hosho surface, to be sewn into the concertina. I made arrangements to get help at Gracefield Arts Centre in working out the correct exposures for the UV unit.

Before I could do this, I began to wornder if I hadn’t been bold enough. Also, I was getting very tired of the finicky work involved in the tiny A6 book. I decided to experiment further, using monoprint, watercolour, gouache, conte crayon and ink to make a composite and more abstract image of the book contents..

I used cartridge paper which was not really suitable but it was all I had to hand and I felt it had potential. I wasn’t sure the image worked as a whole so I cut it up into four pieces.

I then stuggled with the style of the drawings and began to want to create an entirely different look, partly influenced by the style of Eleanor Crow in her illustrations for Max Porter’s Grief is The Thing with Feathers.

I ended up deciding against this as time was becoming short to finish the piece and I would stick to the original plan. For practical and conceptual reasons, I decided to keep to the format and the existing drawing.

I experimented with the images I had drawn and decided not to use all of them as I didn’t think they would come out well on a solar plate. I took a new drawing from monoprint I did showing ridge and furrow and the name Weston, scanned it and digitally cleaned it up using Sketchbook to make an acetate. In the end, I selected eight images, two more than the original six I planned.

I then had to decide finally in what order the images would be presented and which maps they would sit on top of as I couldn’t make the plates until I had done this. Also, although I could have made the process simpler by cutting the prints themselves horizontally, rather than cutting the two A5 plates into eight separate plates, this would mean the plate marks would not sit symmetrically within the book. Since the printmaking is a major part of the project, it seemed important to make clear that each image was a separate work in its own right.

Pamela advised me to cut the plates after the images were etched onto them but this meant there was a high risk – only a few millimetres out would destroy the symmetry of the book. I made two acetates of four images each and etched the plates at Gracefield on 4 and 5 March. There were a few mishaps and I wasted a complete plate in the process. Fortunanately, I was able to buy an emergency plate at Gracefield but with a slightly different spec. This was another variable to add into the many printmaking variables.

My plates

My test prints.

I wondered how the prints would turn out on the Hosho paper so took an injet print of the 1596 map then cut up and printed my test plates on top.

I also tried printing on top of painted and monoprinted Hosho paper that I brought with me on the day.

I went back the next day to make some test prints on Hahnemuhle paper as it turns out the Hosho paper requires to be cut to size from the roll by hand as it tears in the rotary trimmer at Gracefield and I didn’t have the time left in the studio to do this.

To fit the format I had decided on, for the final prints for the book I would have to align four sets of two plates very precisely to keep them straight and evenly spaced within the pages and then trim them.

In between making the plates and printing them, I thought of how much I liked the test plates on the 1596 map printed on Hosho paper (above) and experimented with changing the format entirely and making a Japenese stab binding book instead of a concertina. I would use watercoloured Hosho paper printed with maps in my inkjet printer and print the etched plates of drawn images directly onto it. I re-formatted all the images to fit the changed layout, in order to allow space for the spine of the book, as per the instructions in Making Books.

I cut the Hosho paper to A4 to fit the printer and printed a couple of the maps before trying out the required folds for the spine.

I ran into significant prolems with printing on Hosho – the first prints appeared as a fluke because after that the paper kept jamming or inky marks appeared as the paper did not run through smoothly. I discovered Kozo paper, which is very similar, is available in A4 sheets for inkjet printers but it costs £38 per packet and would have taken up to 10 days to arrive so I had to abandon this idea.

I had intended to give attributions of the maps to the various makers and scanned my handwriting for each, to add to the digitised map image. This is one for the Roy map.

I then decided not to use copies of the original OS, Roy, Pont and estate maps but to use them instead as the basis for hand drawn maps. I took some licence with them in terms of deciding what to put in and what to leave out and how to colour them and write the names In my own handwriting. I came up with eight digital drawings in the same chronological order as before. I then added text for context but in digital typeface (analog handwriting will be added to the etchings once assembled).

I printed the plates with the images over two full days at Gracefield on 11 and 12 March. This was a complex procedure. I made a carefully measured template to ensure accurate registration but mistakes were still made and I ended up with a limited number of acceptable prints, meaning there will be no room for error in assembling the final piece.

These are two of the finished images. The cow and calf are slightly underexposed because of the very fine lines but what I hadn’t really taken on board was that the prints would come out much fainter on the far thinner and less absorbent Hosho than on the Hahnemuhle, which was actually designed for etchings. I seriously considered how the project would work if I were to revert to the Hahnemuhle and make much technically better prints. Eventually, I decided to stay with my decision to use the Hosho, on the basis that it was more consistent with my original intention and that the printmaking was only a part of the overall concept. In any case, the slightly washed out and imperfect look of the prints (except for the heavily lined last one) was more of a piece with the overall aesthetic.

After a lot of agonising about the surface to be used, I discovered that the colour of white Somerset Velvet tones very well with the colour of Hosho to print the maps on so I bought large sheet at Gracefield to cut to the required size, hoping there are no problems with using it with my inkjet printer. I printed the maps onto the Somerset with no problems and cut them to size. I was unsure about whether to cut the deckle edge off the paper, knowing that it wasn’t on all the sheets or all the edges of the A4 size I had cut and that this would an inevitable inconsistency in the size of the pages but decided to let the randomness stay in.

Meanwhile, I began experimenting with overlaying the drawn map images using Sketchbook, Canva and Adobe Light room and became quite excited about the more abstract results reminding me of where I started from in Semester 1.

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I played about with ink and gouache.

I spent two days working out the best way to assemble the piece and actually assembling it. I planned to cut up the acetates I had used to make the plates but, after making another maquette using previously rejected OS maps to see if I could actually stitch throught it, I abandoned this. With considerable difficulty I found I could stitch the inserts in but despite scoring and flattening the fold with the bone folder I then discovered the pages would not shut property. I then reverted to my first plan of using tracing paper.

I then had the dilemma of whether to put the tracing paper inserts in front of or behind the etchings. I wanted to make them the exact same size as the plates but not the prints. I liked seeing through the paper and text to the map if the traced and handwritten image was directly on top of the map. On the other hand, I like the nesting of the different sizes of support, with the smaller tracing paper image on top. Either way was good. I considered making the tracing paper images the same size as the etching so that the discrepancy in symmetry was resolved but eventually decided that the disjunction could be slightly more interesting and enabled a small element of surprise when the pages were turned to discover them.

I made a template for making the holes to ensure the stitching on each double page would be the same and then sewed the three layers together with cream embroidery silk, remembering to remove the template after I made a mistake and stithed it into the first one, which I then took apart and re-did.

The next step was to attach the double sheets together. At one stage I had made a maquette in which I had made paper hinges from the same material as the support but this was a litte bulky and less flexible than the masking tape I had used on previous ones. I planned on using masking tape for the final version but at the last minute bought removable Scotch tape to make the join less visible but also in case I made a mistake and though masking tape is removable, it is not removable from Hosho paper without roughing up its surface. The pages didn’t join entirely straight because I hadn’t cut the deckle edge off the Somerset paper but I decided to leave it how it was. After all, everything about the subject was a bit higgety piggelty.

Since the start of the project planning I intended to make hard covers for the book, using the earliest 1596 map with two of my test plate images printed directly onto it on the front and a monoprint of ridge and furrow on the back and had prepared these to wrap round and attach to cover boards.

I researched how to make the covers:

London Centre for Book Arts, Making Books (Pavilion, 2017)

https://share.google/fd7MERl9IHsruwOnd

I cut two x 2mm thick cards to size and then cut the images with a 15 mm margin all round to allow for folding around the back. After cutting the images I applied a thin coat of Dorland’s Wax Medium to protect them and left it to dry hard.

I was worried about how the Hosho paper would behave when stuck to the card with PVA in case it wrinkled or tore or perhaps even disintegrate so I made a test piece with offcuts of the image and of the card. When wet, the paper became extremely pliable and did wrinkle very easily but if I was very slow and careful I could gradually ease it onto the board before smoothing it to the edges. A few tiny wrinkles did appear but they’re not as noticeable in the flesh as in the photo.

The next stage was a bit nerve wracking as I only had the two cover papers and couldn’t make a mistake. I followed carefully the instructions in Making Books and the cover paper went on to the board without a problem and hardly a wrinkle. The cover board started to bend slightly – maybe because a little damp from the PVA sticking the paper to it – so I then placed the two covers and the folded book under a heavy weight for several hours, ready to attach the covers to the book. I then attached the covers to the book and place the whole thing under a weighted board between sheets of blotting paper overnight.

I decided to make a physical as well as electronic submission which allows a proper view of the tacticity of the artefact with its various scales, textures and its delicacy in a way a PDF cannot. It’s in the form of a box file that represents a flavour of the process of creating the book and as well as the finished book includes samples of some of the processes that have gone into making it: images I chose not to include in the finished book; experimental paintings; monoprints; acetates; maquettes of foundational and/or abandoned ideas; templates; notes to self etc. All this can be rummaged through, randomly. The collection of material in the box becomes memorabilia, containing virtual memories, impressions and objects, just as in life.