A Small Betrayal

Today I jumped ship to write about the Greenlandic language for the Huffington Post.
You can read it here.

How To Say 'I Love You' In Greenlandic at Bookartbookshop, London

Thanks to everyone who came along to the private view of my exhibition in the window of Bookartbookshop on Friday night. It was wonderful to see so many old friends and meet new ones.

Anna served canapés inspired by How To Say 'I Love You' In Greenlandic. The onigiri - or Japanese rice balls - looked like snowballs with colourful fillings. The Greenlandic language doesn't appear to have a word for 'rice ball' but I was pleased to find an equivalent so that we could provide a Greenlandic menu, with translations for the English-speakers present.

The exhibition continues until 29 November, to be followed by a new work by Tom Phillips, creator of A Humument, the altered book to end all altered books. Phillips' work has featured in some of my recent workshops, and I'm excited to see what he does next with the book form.

Altered Books Workshop: Albion Beatnik, Oxford

An altered book created by Mike Sims (Poetry Society Publications Manager) 

at a workshop during the Free Verse Book Fair in London. 

I'll be running an Altered Books Workshop in the Albion Beatnik bookshop in Oxford in December - details below. This will be a twist on previous workshops, as participants will be invited to pick their own book from the bookshop's shelves - and then turn it into an entirely new work.

Many thanks to Dennis Harrison for deciding to offer another bookish event so soon after the phenomenal series of poetry readings that was this month's The Sounds of Surprise festival (still going strong - come along!). Also a big thank you to the bookshop's resident bookbinder Lucie Forejtová, who runs Immaginacija and makes a beautiful range of handmade stationery. I've snaffled one of her coptic-bound appointment diaries for next year, and now I can't wait for January.

ALTERED BOOKS 
5 December 2012, 18.30

In this workshop we select existing books from Albion Beatnik's shelves and adapt them using cut-up, collage and mark-making techniques to create completely new structures and texts. For inspiration, we'll examine altered books made by artists and writers including Tom Phillips' A Humument and Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes. We'll discuss poetry beyond the text including visual elements, invisible elements and the role of chance in writing. Come prepared to think in three dimensions, and forget all you were ever taught about not scribbling in books.

Cost: £12 per person. Includes materials and a £5 voucher towards the cost of a book from Albion Beatnik.
To book your place leave a comment below and I'll get back to you!
Venue: Albion Beatnik Bookshop, 34 Walton Street, Oxford, Oxfordshire OX2 6AA

Slightly Foxed Children's Catalogue

Over the last few years I’ve contributed the occasional illustration to Slightly Foxed, a delightful quarterly review of old books.

Slightly Foxed on Gloucester Road, the second-hand bookshop rescued and now run by the magazine, has been solving reader’s queries and sourcing out-of-print books for some years. This winter sees the launch of their first children’s catalogue – and I’m happy to see that my illustrations of a sly old fox with his eye on some kookaburra bookends grace the front and back covers. You can view the whole catalogue online here.

If you like bookends, you might be interested to know that these unfortunate birds were inspired by the work of Australian ceramic artist Grace Seccombe, whose humble kookaburra and koala bookends now fetch wild prices among collectors. She's not well-represented online, but there's a short introduction to her work here.

Escapism for Amateurs

As a huge fan of Sarah Nicholls' work, I was delighted when the latest in her series of free informational pamphlets arrived in the post recently. Escapism for Amateurs (pictured above and below) is an oblique homage to Houdini that follows in the wake of other useful publications such as A Guide to Leisure Activities for Introverts and There are Dangers to Being an R&B Heartthrob. I look forward to practising its precepts, including such valuable lessons as 'no performer should attempt to bite off a red hot iron unless he has a good set of teeth'. Quite. 

Nicholls is a Brooklyn-based visual artist who 'makes pictures with language, books with pictures, prints with type, and animations with words.' If you follow the links above, you'll find a selection of images demonstrating the vibrant colours and dynamic typography characteristic of Nicholls' work, not to mention its wry sense of humour.

How To Say I Love You In Greenlandic at Bookartbookshop

I'm delighted to be exhibiting How To Say 'I Love You' In Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet at London's wonderful Bookartbookshop. Readers who have yet to visit this cavern of bibliographic enchantments can feast their eyes on the panoramic view of the shop floor, below. 



The exhibition will open on Friday 16 November and runs until 29 November. 

There is a Private View on Friday 16 November from 18.oo - 22.00, during which copies of How To Say 'I Love You' In Greenlandic will be on sale, and a range of Greenlandic greeting cards will be launched. Refreshments inspired by the Arctic landscape will be served.

There will be an artist's talk and group discussion on the subject of Geopoetics and Artists Books on Wednesday 21st November from 1800. This is a free event but numbers are limited so please contact the gallery to book your place.

Location details below. Please check shop opening hours before your visit.

Book Artists Aloft

As the summer drew to a close, book artists Mette-Sofie D. Ambeck (Ambeck Design) and Mike Nicholson (Ensixteen Editions) visited me in Oxford. How would I entertain the two travellers, one fresh from the flatlands of Jutland, and the other, a vertigo-suffering Londoner?

We went as high as it's possible to go in this city of spires, climbing up the tower of the University Church of St. Mary. I hoped the candy-cane pillars, the gargoyles and the crumbling finials might interest Ambeck, whose latest book (pictured above) is a celebration of the stone-carvings found among the curious, shadowed pathways and tombs of Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington, North London. Ambeck has worked with Tom Sowden in the studio at Centre for Fine Print Research in Bristol to replicate her photo-archive through laser cutting. In this process, the laser sears into the paper fibres, creating a ghostly image that is not only the perfect technique to represent the crumbling, eroded gravestones but also evoking mortality itself.

The clouds lowered as we climbed - on the east side of the tower our faces were stung with rain - from the west we saw patches of sunshine break through thunderous skies to illuminate the cornfields on the far side of the city. Pressed in against the ancient walls as other sightseers passed us on the balcony, we noticed an abundance of graffiti left by earlier climbers.

Deciphering the amateur carvings in the Tower's winding stairwell, the descent was giddying. The image below, from the cover of Mike Nicholson's new edition Glass Half-Full/Glass-Half Empty, was penned many days before our climb, but it captures the sense of disorientation we felt on returning to the cobbled ground, and to the present moment. 

Readers are encouraged to visit the Small Publishers Fair in London on 16th and 17th November, to take a closer look at both Ambeck's and Nicholson's books.