Artists Books

The image above is a cover of one of my mini tea-bag sized books from the Artists Book project. After deciding to study 'tea' as my Objet Trouvet I looked at various ways of illustrating it, from typography regarding tea connotations to images of the actual tea bags themselves. After using the printing press to attain prints of actual tea bags I was amazed at the clarity of them, and developed a series of different shape/sized tea bags in both singular prints and repeats. It was a simple idea and technique, yet I feel that this project was one of my most successful this year. For the Contemporary Artists' Book Fair held in Leeds, I produced a series of ten miniature books with reduced size prints and a series of larger prints, packaged in A4 printed envelopes.

Whilst browsing the stands at the Book Fair, I purchased a book by Ciara Healy based upon Birds as I was drawn to it due to its bright, canary-yellow cover. The image below is taken from the website http://www.ignition.ie/, from which some of her work can be purchased. I also bought a smaller book called 'Honey Darling's Old Clothes', as the vivid colour of the lobster again caught my eye. Within the book are four progressive images of a pet lobster shown to be growing in size throughout her lifespan. As I discovered through our personal project and with many of the books at the Book Fair, the best ideas are often relatively simple yet when communicated effectively and clearly, make for the best artists books.