Unique Objects

Paper Recycling

 

I was with my sisters, clearing out the parental home, up at Doffcocker, Bolton, some months after our father's death. It must have been summer, 2005, for I was wondering what I might do with my new computer, when I came across some stashes of legal stationery including great blank folded sheets of obsolete deed-paper (Dad was a solicitor) and I had the idea of pasting text and artwork into unique object booklets.
        My first attempt was a poem A Lissom Bough, an epithalamium and wedding-gift for the marriage of Alison O'Brien and Phil Foster, a pair of Hebden Bridge poets. Then I made three booklets of texts from the Bauble. What to do with these? They were gladly received as Christmas presents by a set of my nieces. The only record I have of that set is shown below. I mean to make more, but I'd like to know where they might be going. There's a certain tattiness to the accomplished objects, which is part of their genuine ethos.

 

 

Unique Objects: Series 1 (Haslam's Deeds)
#1

Papers
James Jackson & Co, "LEGAL", Halifax
"Goatskin Parchment"
Conqueror (light card)
Entwistle Thorpe Layout Pad
Paintings (paper collage & Indian inks)
3 originals; 1 copy, all untitled
Glue
Mangers Border & Overlap Adhesive
Typesetting &c.
PC (Microsoft Word) Baskerville Old Face
inkjet printing
Staples
Rexel 56
Masking Tape
Scotch 1"

Made
October 2005

And here's the cover of another, an "Aleethia" made for Peter Manson:

Well, it was fun making these, but there are limits, in, for example, my supply of obsolete legal deed-paper, and to my ability, as artist, to take myself seriously.