13 May 2011

The week at college

At the final Bokship seminar, "thinking about what we're making" - an exercise in choosing where and how to display a piece of work - on the wall, on shelves, a "moment of importance" in a vitrine ... etc etc...
Egidja's work consists of "fired" books, too fragile to cart around, so she chose to show photos. Juk-Hee's shredded books spill out into the space; my "wormhole" looks on in astonishment -
Youngest participant was BookBaby, in her bling footwear -
Also, information about marketing and promotion - including gallery and bookshop markups, various types of publicity, pricing ("less respect for low priced work"), book fairs and moving outside them, "distributing the idea of the work", workshops, launch, press releases...

Afterwards, the chat in the congenial environment is an important part of the session -
Next day, a special seminar with Paul Coldwell, who has published three books including his prints. He talked about the genesis and production of Freud's Coat, With the Melting of the Snows, and Kafka's Doll, and also brought along some artist's books that he owns, including a huge, leather-cased, beautiful edition of Patrick Caulfield prints juxtaposed with poems, another with some prints by Joe Tilson, Tim O'Reilly's Accidental Journey.
The meat of the seminar was the response to the question, "how do you make money doing this" - strategies for knowing your audience, being in the right place, judging and working on the effect of the work - how do people know that you exist and what your ideas are; what srategies can you use to make it easy for people to find out.
Textile printing was mostly for the "sky birds" piece with its imminent deadline -
I rescued some "nice" paper from the bin and used the marks on it for a bit of play (though this is on the clean side of the sheet) -
More printing was for the piece for the midpoint review on Tuesday 17th - with Sky Birds out of the way, I have a couple of days to finish that. All of a sudden there seem to be too many deadlines!

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