08 August 2011

Book du jour - "accordion with tunnel"

This structure in Alisa Golden's book interested me -
Instead of cutting a "tunnel" I found myself cutting a series of doors. (Once you pick up the tools and get making, it can take on a life of its own...)
As I cut the doors, I wondered what the story would be. Coming to the bit of paper at the end of the tunnel, I found myself drawing a window. And panels on the doors. And then a house-plan of the doors and window - the corridor - suddenly it was about this long, dark corridor. I wrote the story, doodled a bit to 'picture' the corridor, and then decided I didn't want the plan in the book - so must re-do it. What emerged from the re-writing of the story was a nice clean version -
Draft on the left, second version on the right -
And the back and front covers of the first and second versions -
But when I ran it through the Domestic Reading Tester, it failed - simply because unfolding the tunnel structure is not an obvious "reading reaction" when you're holding this book to read it. This is a structure that's good for display, rather than a page-turner.

A corridor is a kind of journey line - it's defined variously as giving access to apartments, a covered passageway encircling a place, a strip of land connecting two countries ... and there's a corridor in many railway carriages.

This "corridor story" fits in with my project, sort of. (I'd done something similar at some point in the foundation course, working towards a sculpture idea; it probably comes from some deep dark place...) How to develop it? In a different format, first of all - concertina or codex, with doors pictured on or cut into the pages, with darkness behind them no doubt. I can imagine using gloomy photographs. An excuse to return to Peter Zumthor's pavilion at the Serpentine, which has a covered passageway running around the centre ... perhaps it was the photos I took there a while back that stirred the can of worms that became the little story and little book.

1 comment:

Dijanne Cevaal said...

HI Margaret
are you familiar with this book maker?
YouTube - KQED Spark - Julie Chen

You might enjoy her take on books.