Anyway, we were given 10 weeks to complete a project of our chosing which would culminate in a exhibition. I chose a subject that would allow me to tell stories and make books, which I'd been told where my strengths. It was all about the foreign students who rented the attic bedrooms of my house when I was a kid. Over the years we had students from across Europe, Asia and South America, and we accumulated A LOT of stories.
I made 3 books for the show, the last being the simplest - the actual envelopes from the students letters, sewn together. The first book I made was the main focus of the entire project, I had narrowed down the stories to the most interesting and wrote them onto a postcard style page, with a portait opposite. The actual visual side of this book took longer then anything else, in the end the portraits were all different styles from my experiments, arranged on top of layered letters (printed onto tracing paper) with name plates and illustrated objects relating to the individuals. The mechanical side of the book also took a while to sort out because I wanted the book to have a spine. It took 3 attempts but I eventually got the width right and created an interesting ternary coloured spine purely by accident.
The final book I made was just a compilation of the stamps I'd illustrated for the postcard pages.
I was pretty sure from the onset that I wanted a tablecloth map for the exhibition display because I wanted it to look domestic and welcoming. The tutors weren't particularly enthusiastic about this idea, which didn't really change even through to the final week, when they came up with a wide variety of wild suggestions of how I could change, re-do or even scrap it altogether. I took no notice of this because I'd recieved a lot of encouragement about it from literally everyone else who saw it, It was a bit of a confidence hit though.
I made the tablecloth by projecting a world map onto cloth, fabric painting it in earthy colours. I then sewed the map I'd made onto blue fabric and created a red flightpath from the students prospective countries to my house and attached their names.
To fill the extra wall I had intended to write the books introduction onto the board but I thought my actual drawings didn't have enough prominance in the show. I decided to make a few washing lines with the pegged on drawings, which was similar to the setup of my studio space during the project. Eileen suggested that I use the same red thread I had used for the flight path to draw together my work and to contrast the white boards. I also used this thread to hang my sketchbook and envelope book onto the wall.
