Book: Low tide
Video:
About the Project:
Low Tide is an example of crossed-structure binding, a technique great for making sturdy notebooks without thick covers or any adhesive. The cover features the impression of whole sardines, in acrylic paint. Where the book’s structural strips overlap the printed fish, I hand-painted a fish skeleton to break up the imagery. While friction alone is enough to hold this binding style together, I took it a step further by hammering brass fasteners at each location of the printed fish’s eye.
Fishing and other seafaring activities have always been important in my family. My youth was full of playing at the beach and amongst the docks my grandparents’ small marina on the New England coast. Low tide was the best time for exploring, especially at night with a flashlight. Looking amongst the seaweed in shallow waters and across the sandbars exposed by the receding tide, you could watch the whole food chain play out before your eyes. Exploring also meant collecting washed-up “treasures” (green crab carcasses, bluefish skeletons, mollusk shells, etc.) and printing with them on old t-shirts with my mother.
Our prints weren’t just cool because they gave new life to our old shirts, but because they were hyper-local catalogs of the marine life in our area. While our impressions never reached the detail of the artist-level Gyotaku fish printers of Japan and Hawaii, we were happy to have a one-of-a-kind symbol of our appreciation for the ocean to wear on our chest. Lately, I’ve been remembering this activity and I took great delight and nostalgia in bringing it into my bookbinding practice for this project.
I learned this no-adhesive crossed-structure binding in a class taught by Sarah Nicholls at the Center for Book Arts in New York. I was impressed by the strength of the book despite it not having a thicker cover, and admired how her “daily driver” version had patinaed without tearing. The way that the cover flaps interrupted the face of the book inspired the idea for painting a fish skeleton motif.
Working with once-frozen fish ended up being messier than I expected. I think these rock-solid frozen sardines that I bought at a discount from the back of a fish market were not choice quality, but I wanted to be both budget and waste conscious.
Please enjoy these images from the making of Low Tide.
MATERIALS
Covers - Canson Mi-teintes drawing paper, white
Paper - 24/60lbs - off-white
Thread - French waxed linen thread (size 25)
Fish - Sardine
Brass fasteners
While this is not intended to be a tutorial, you may feel inspired and/or challenged to use some of the featured techniques to make something functional and beautiful. I hope this is the case.
If you have any questions about this project or otherwise, contact Bounty Archive Management.
