Working It Out.

I've had a maze book folded for some time, waiting for me to do something with it.  You may remember, I showed you some work I'd found when unrolling what I thought was some plain paper (see it here), and said I would make books with it...well, this is the dry run for those.  I wanted to see how paper of this size folded into a maze.  So, having done most of what I wanted with the previous books, I thought I'd play with this one, rather than make something from scratch.

I had an idea.  I was going to play with the idea of 'taking a line for a walk', Paul Klee's well known description of drawing, by adhering scraps of rust dyed silk to the book, and then stitching to connect them.  The silk, however, when I positioned the first piece, had other plans...and here's the first page.

I think what interested me first, was the space surrounding the scrap (try to imagine it without the stitch).  Rather than stitch it down, though, I wanted to surround it with stitch, cage it in some way, so that it was held within that space.  This was the result...and here are the two pages that combine with it, when the book is opened, to make a spread.

Each piece has its own definitive space, a different shape, a different positioning on the paper, and it's own cage.  Here is the spread:

The spread tells a different story, somehow.  The balance is different...on reflection, that central piece might have been better, had it been smaller...but I don't want to change it.  Something to think about as I work the remaining spreads. 

Of course, each spread has its reverse :

The reverse embraces a fourth page, but the stitch is at the top of the page, and doesn't relate to anything on the other side...that's because it is folded in a similar way to the last book; if you remember, there was a section which was folded in on itself, like this :

I'm talking about the green V shape to the left of the book.  Instead of leaving that open, in this book, I've stitched the two pages that constitute the V shape to each other at the top, creating a pocket for an inclusion.  And that's as far as I've got.  I like it when the materials dictate what the piece wants to be.  It relates now to the other 'fragments' pieces I've made.  Not sure if I'll leave the stitching as it is on the reverse, or do something else with it...that remains to be seen, and probably won't be decided until the whole piece is stitched.