Happy New Year!

It is January 2021, and I wish you all a better year than the last one.

I will be delivering the works for my solo exhibition Square Dance in a few days. It will open (whatever that may mean by the time we get there) on January 16, 2021 at the Saskatchewan Craft Council Gallery in Saskatoon. That means packing all of the work, a job which is both painstaking and tedious.

The three-dimensional works have all been packed. Twenty-twenty Hindsight was the last, and I packaged it early in the week. Each of the nine fortunetellers was signed and dated and put in its little blue box.

The nine little blue boxes then went into a bigger box with foam and bubble pack to keep them from rubbing and getting surface damage.

The wall pieces were a bigger problem. I did not want to go to the trouble —David’s trouble actually— of having crates made, so I had to find an alternative. Enter Gekko Dots.

These are one inch reusable silicon discs I purchased to use in mounting several of the works. They won’t hold the weight of the piece, but will be used to hold single menko and/or corners to the wall.

I decided the best way to prepare the works for transport was to mount them temporarily to heavyweight card stock. You can see a Gekko Dot in position in the image below. The grey-backed menko was flipped over onto the dot and tacked in place.

Here’s the piece mounted and ready for a second protective layer of card stock to be laid on top and fastened in place with painter’s tape.

Not all the works fit so neatly on a single sheet of card. For the larger ones I mounted as much as possible on one sheet, placed a second sheet of card on top, then folded the rest of the work over. The pointy finger in the image below shows the folding point.

A third sheet of card was added to protect the folded layer and the whole bundle taped at a few points on the edges. The card-encased works slide neatly into some cardboard shipping containers left from paper purchases.

Another job this week was writing out supplementary text for gallery labels. I am not a huge fan of telling people about the work instead of just showing it to them, but a little background can be interesting and helpful for the viewer. No statement is longer than 150 words, and most are much shorter.

The final job will be writing out detailed installation instructions in case I am not allowed to be in the gallery during installation.

Sigh.

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In other book arts news:

If you have finished all the projects you wanted to make from the Byopia Press Advent Calendar 2020, and like learning things from videos, you might check out Paula Beardell Krieg’s Youtube playlists.

Paula’s Folding Paper playlist is here. (This includes some book-related videos.) Her complete menu is here.

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If you are interested in the history of colour printing, you might read the article William Kurtz and the Attempt To Monopolize Color Printing in America on the CMYK History blog. From the article:

This is the story of how Kurtz rose to prominence as a photographer, revolutionized printing, and then found himself at the mercy of his business partners and patent trolls looking to capitalize on his life’s work.