PRESS RELEASE 2019

Since mid-February I have been working with foundation press and a group of other students to create publications, some solo and some collaborative to sell at the Baltic book fair. We have taken part in workshops group demonstrations and brain storming in order to plan or publications and explore different types of making and different ways of creating publications. It took me a while to decide on what to make my publication on and in comparison, to some other things I have created in the past I didn’t want to go over the top I just wanted it to be strategically minimum. I ended up deciding to make a book similar to the print’s id been making in the rest of my practice recently which are fictitious deities based around my environment. I decided to keep that theme except creative a narrative around these strange characters. The names I gave these gods juxtapose the gods in appearance but are inspired by the same topic they were. When it came down to composing the book, I decided just to have the drawings and create symbols that correspond to them alongside and then have a key at the back with descriptions of the gods.

 

On the day of the event we came in pretty much ready to go as we had access to the floor the day before to set up our stall and workshop. This was great as we got to see how the teams at the Baltic go about preparing the space before the other sellers arrived. We even got to see some behind the scenes of the Baltic such as the industrial lift that they use to transport shipping containers up to the gallery spaces which is something not many people get to see and gave a real insight on how the gallery runs day to day. On the actual day we had no strict timeline of who does what we just swapped roles when we'd had enough of one. While at least two people were manning the stall, others were creating prints with the public to go into a free publication we wanted to print, bind and distribute while the fair was going on. The book we made ‘TALK OVER PRINT’ is a collection of thoughts, both from those sharing books at the market and from self-publishers invited from outside of the northeast. We set out to use books that people had bought at the market to ‘over print’ on the text of the book in a work shop of sorts, involving the public in the process of making a book and how the risograph printer works. It was a fantastic opportunity to sell my work as well as meet other local artists and publishers as well as meeting other driven students from across the faculty who were interested in print, self-publishing as well as running workshops.