The Ten Strategies

An ongoing list of projects, schemes and brainwaves that will characterise the time between now and the end of term...Probably more than ten, but the idea is to sound out the activities I'm engaged with... some complex, some simple. Probably, to limit to ten, and to better embrace the concept of strategies, I should distill and recombine these notions to approaches- so rather than saying "will read J.Searle Book" I'll eventually say "Read key texts"

Today, though, I'm firefighting: too many deadlines.

Things I'm going to do in the near future.

GO to fairs/ small publisher/LAB, any openings that i can get to
Films to watch?
Research at National Gallery: people and books in portraiture
reading I'll undertake? Includes Searle, Drucker
My list of artists: their enthusiasms and why they matter: this is going
Themes of practice: the way I'll be organising my slideshow taps into this
Running course at Spike: this should, I hope, elucidate certain tropes within bookbinding for me

sidenote: my bookbinding talk :
]
what being able to bind gives you: the ability to organise and compartmentalise

I'm going to chase up and try to read as many of the original theoretical texts on book art that I can find. (eg Carrion, etc)

I'm going to be writing a piece that will point a key text (searle)
at an older artists book, and a more contemporary one, in order to show
my conceptual tool
kit at work and in order to road-test some of my assumptions

More exploratory essays to condense and concatenate some areas which
would otherwise be problematic to me: eg history of books and printing/
spatiality of books/ some assessment of the philosophical supermarket
of conceptual tools that are available.

I'm going to continue to work on an artists book and reflect on progress. I think this constitutes 2 activities, namely:

An engagement with an actual project- the praxis of practice, so to
speak. [Specifically, developing my work on Whistling Copse]. Photos,
collating research. Writing-into research.
A self reflexive monitoring of this which is recorded in my journal, adminicle

Assembling a pictorial resource that will allow me to create
lectures and talks on a number of topics associated with the book arts.
I'll also be thinking of "modular" sets of ideas that I can use to
create a number of different talks from, based on my areas of interest
and expertise.

I'm going to be showing books , prints and drawings at several
exhibitions (Bradford/LAB, small publisher's fair) : producing work and
showing it. Also illustration work.

I'm going to be designing a floorplan for the library, thinking
about visual communication: one thing that has occurred is the problem
of differentiating rules for representation by simile and by symbol-
the task of cartography to indicate yet simplify, and the task of
design to unify, yet differentiate.

Series of notes pertaining to "personal buzzwords": phrases that
capture some of my current concerns in artistic practice. I'm going to
make a seperate "parking lot" post for this...

I'm going to be working at the library, helping develop an artists
book with Anthony Beeson for Sarah's librarians books project, as well
as developing a book for the project myself.

I'll be taking part in a binding workshop organised by Sarah.

I'll be becoming familiar with the litho workshop and hopefully starting work on an editioned book there in the next few weeks.