salvage sketchbooks

I was raised in a family that valued books, and I was taught to respect and to treasure them. My parents considered them sacred. We were not to draw on the pages, make marginalia or dog ears or endanger their spines by leaving them spread open upturned on a table or chair so that we could easily save a place. After our family home was destroyed in a bushfire, my parents went out and bought cartons full of used books from the local thrift store, just so that they could have the familiar scent of old books around them, even before the house was rebuilt.

When my grandfather (a mathematician of note) passed, his books were donated to the University of Adelaide. They kept them in their boxes for twenty years and then returned them to us so that when my parents also passed, I was left with a pile of mathematical textbooks in languages including German, English, French, Russian and Czech, that nobody seems to want. I had a strong feeling that I am their last custodian...so I began to explore the possibilities of them new life. Appalling as it may seem to purists, I have been transforming them into sketchbooks, taking apart the pages, stitching them together in different conformations and then giving them back to their covers. Staining the pages with plant extractions, using writing, collage and drawing to add to their palimpsest layers.

It took me years to develop the courage to work in this way and now I want to share it with you.

In this course we will make beautiful “salvage sketchbooks”, using repurposed materials (though you can substitute more luxurious supplies if you wish) in which we explore transforming unwanted books and used notebooks that have lost their relevance, drawings that no longer warm the heart and drifting homeless papers into unique concertina sketchbooks ready to be infused with the poetics of place.

We will add colour to the pages using leaves and flowers, create tidelines and heartmaps, draw, paint and write. In addition to the concertina format, I will also share (for the first time) a folded book form built on the number 9 (my favourite) that allows for a never-ending story to dance around and around in your hands. We will combine cloth and paper in the making, printing a version with leaves, and then another using time and found elements.

This is a course that can really only be offered online...some of the processes take several days, and all together the time required to teach it in person would be at least a month...a luxury none of us can afford. So I am delighted to be able to offer it to anyone, anywhere :: provided, of course, that you have access to the internet.

The content of the course works as well for the armchair sailor at home as it does for the traveller keen to explore the poetics of place while on their wanderings. It is not for those who wish their work to be of archival quality and to be handed down for generations to come or stored in the Pitt Rivers Museum. The reality is that none of us are of "archival quality" and I for one have accepted that when I pass, my family will probably make a bonfire of my notebooks (or compost them, depending on which one of my children are in charge). I am under no illusions that my writings and drawings are of interest to anyone but myself...and possibly some of you lovely armchair sailors.

The books we will make are for our own use and pleasure. Scrawl across the pages if you will, smear them with earth and crushed leaves, write out your deepest thoughts and paint to your heart's content. Make as many as you want or need. These books are for the here and the now.