I have been working with sculptor Jake Harvey and book artist Helen Douglas on a publication for their exhibition which opens on 19 July at the Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum and Arts Centre in Lochmaddy, North Uist. The exhibition will then tour to various venues including the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh.
Meeting Point Within the Lewisian is inspired by the travels and work of Dr James Hutton (1726–1797), widely acknowledged as the founder of modern geology, and has led the artists to Uist to experience the Lewisian gneiss complex, the planet’s oldest rock. The publication includes sculptures, book works and photographs that take the stone and coastal landscape of the Western Isles as a starting point, alongside texts by Murdo Macdonald, Alan McKirdy, Juliet Kinchin, Joel Fisher and Beth Williamson.
It has been really interesting working on the book with these artists, who are both highly experienced in publishing: after I had finalised a layout and grid for the book, the artists went away and created an actual size paper mock-up of the book pages using images printed to scale alongside print-outs of the essays and texts which I had typeset. From this guide, I then developed the layout of each page in InDesign, following the placement given by the artists, but making subtle changes and interventions to sit within the original layout and grid, and to accommodate page numbers, captions etc. After further refinements and adjustments with the artists, the book was sent to the printer for printed proofs along with two A0 colour callibrated scatter proofs on which I managed to squeeze almost all of the images in the book.
It was wonderful to see a complete printout proof of the book: I love this journey of a book when something that has existed on screen starts to take on more of physical presence – though this book also had an earlier physical life as a full-size rough mock-up, held together with glue and tape. It was especially useful to have the calibrated scatter proofs as they revealed that some of the images were much darker than they appeared on screen. After making some adjustments to colour, brightness and contrast, we signed off proofs of the book and are currently waiting for running sheets to come back from the printers, Gomer in Wales.
The cover will be foil blocked in Foilco 612 Metro Grey on Wicotex Brillianta BRI4003 Light Grey fabric with printed grey endpapers – the cover template, with position of foil blocking on the front and spine is shown below. Gomer are currently preparing samples to test the blocking – we have specified a deep impression on the blocking so it will be interesting to see how that works – a physical process that can’t be predicted digitally!
