Walking

Artist’s book on handmade cotton-rag paper setting eight lines from Maureen Duffy’s poem Wanderer; a double-sided concertina book measuring 150cm long and 15cm high when fully open, closed in slipcase 18cm x 20cm x 1.5cm, with five double-pages on the first side and four on the other, plus cover and back page; with watercolour, acrylics, clay-slip, acid-free adhesive; lettered with a driftwood stick, wooden pottery tool, kebab stick and a wooden clothes-peg. Signed, numbered and dated: this copy is 2 in an edition of 3 variants.

When I’m working on an artist’s book, I look for where elements of the book’s structure and material form can reflect aspects of the poem, in terms of meaning and connections, associations, so that the book can embody the words as fully as possible. Maureen Duffy’s poem Wanderer has empathy and identification at its heart; I chose the last eight lines to set within a construction I hoped could embody both the words and these qualities. I wanted the connections to be clear and simple, for the book to be pared back, not over-decorated, for every mark to be meaningful.

To begin the process, I thought about the first visual image that the poem had given me –  that long walk towards safety and freedom –  and I conceived the design in terms of three long lines, circling endlessly round a double-sided book, to begin again at the beginning. I saw a long line of wanderers, a long line of watercolour to represent the vast distances of terrain to be crossed, and the words of the poem themselves in a long line – these three lines juxtaposed and mirroring each other along the book’s length.

Then I looked at how the book’s material construction could reflect the meaning of the words, in terms of the size, shape and number of the pages, and the path they follow through the book. This book clearly needed a linear structure, like a classic concertina- fold book, but not exactly. I wanted more continuity than individual jointed pages could give. So I made it from four long sheets of handmade paper, each one 75cm long x 15cm high, each one folded into five square pages 15cm x 15cm

and I stuck two sheets side-by side, and two sheets back-to-back, and hinged the whole thing at the middle joint with another sheet. This makes a long book with five double-page spreads on the first side, and four on the other side, plus front and back covers.  And in the middle, crucially, a visible joint between the sheets. I set the text so that this joint falls at two crucial points in the poem:

On the first side, the valley joint or hinge trough becomes an abyss of nothingness, where the wanderers, and the terrain they wander, fade into the void mid-line

We/ have become ghosts    wandering a continent 

– and on the other side, in the middle of the line

believing / that between there must be life, vibrant

the corresponding mountain top joint becomes the summit, a craggy high pass the wanderers must scale before they can reach the longed-for sunlit lands of life on the other side.

A further way to work with the material that draws on the meaning of the words is with colour. The colour of the landscape line changes page by page: it begins with earthy browns,

turning to the dry sandy-ochre tones of the parched desert,

then fades into a faint translucent thin grey, disappearing to nothing at the abyss –

and then turns to a watery grey with indistinct hints of blue

and areas of light and darkness

fading and darkening again at the crossing point between one side and the other

through shadowed black and watery blues

to represent an equally inhospitable sea-crossing and its analogous life-journey,

– and only on the words ‘longing’ and ‘believing’ do the blues strengthen,

and then turn to green and gold with ‘life / vibrant, hopeful’, and circle round to the earthy browns of the cover again, bringing the text and the wanderer back to the beginning.

The colours change not just in the watercolour line, but in the line of wanderers too, where the figures become more diversely coloured, brighter, more individually marked, more vivid, and the line of the words reflects the line of people across the terrain like a mirror, or like a mirage in the desert.

For the lettering, and to make the marks for the people, reflecting the development and movement of the words, I used some quirky lettering tools: a driftwood stick from the Thames, carved by water and flung up on the sandy foreshore on London’s South Bank, a wooden kebab-stick sharpened to a point, and a pottery tool.

These all make great lettering-pens because they’re so rudimentary; the lack of a nib-dip to control the flow of ink or paint means that the colour has its own fluid agency. I don’t like to be too controlling of the materials – I like to let them do their own thing (up to a point) and work with the freedom of the result.

The same thing applies to the tool I used to mark the people-line: a wooden clothes-peg, with its wire stripped out, makes two beautiful pens which you can use in different ways – either like a broad italic nib sideways on, or using just the corner for a smaller mark or detail.

A clothes-peg is a nice domestic reference, intimate but universal, bringing individuality to each person in the line – each one carrying their own burden, their own history, their own life. I wanted this to reflect the poem’s identification with the wanderer, not just an anonymous migrant, a refugee, a homeless person, but a unique, unrepeatable individual human being like oneself.

The next book in this series of four is also about journeying: going home / dol dhachaigh.