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Turn Your Travels into a Book with Gail Rieke | April 20 – 26, 2014

 
 

Artist Gail Rieke wrote to us recently:
 
 

Lately I’ve been working on two travel journals. They live in suitcases on the suitcase wall in my studio. The arrows indicate the suitcases containing these two journals:
 
 

suitcaseriekepenland

 
 

Otafuku’s Dream is a journal of two trips I took to Japan in 2012:

 
 

Otafuku's Dream Journal

 
 

The transparent pages usually live folded up within a cocoon folder tied with a grey kimono sash but sometimes they are mounted on a mylar covered window for display:

 
 

Otafuku's Dream Pages

 
 

Gail Rieke
The Artist as Traveler
In the books studio
April 20 – 26, 2014
Do you have a pile of travel memorabilia stashed somewhere in your life? Have you promised yourself that you will return to it someday and make it into something meaningful? This workshop explores how travel has affected the lives of artists throughout history and how you can transform memory into artistic expression. The workshop will include individual and collaborative exercises in collage, drawing, mapping, writing, and bookmaking. Our pieces will be structured at the onset and open-ended in their resolution. Ignite your own unique responses! Take a leap! Beginning level. Code S03B

 
 

Register here for this workshop

 
 

The second journal I’m working on right now is about two trips I took to France, teaching at my friend’s rural studio in a medieval town and then exploring Paris. Here are some pages in-process responding to one of these trips:

 
 

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Gail Rieke has taught at the University of Edmonton (Canada), Haystack (ME), American Academy of Bookbinding (CO), and the Brayer Studio (Japan), among others. Her exhibitions include: the Cheongju International Biennale in Korea and a career retrospective at Museum of Fine Arts (Santa Fe).

 
 

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A Boat Story

Rachel Mauser, We Will Find the Sea, cut paper, modified coptic binding, pewter, walnut
Rachel Mauser, We Will Find the Sea, cut paper, modified coptic binding, pewter, walnut

Once upon a time there was an artist named Rachel. She grew up going to camp during the summers, where she learned to sail, kayak and canoe. No boat was unknown to her. Young Rachel carried the image of boats with her into adult life.

Last summer, Adult Rachel found herself in a one-week pewtersmithing class as part of her core fellowship at Penland. Pewter? she thought. The instructors were two of the most well-known pewtersmiths in the land. Rachel had no experience with pewter–or much metal experience at all, for that matter. She was uncertain. Her uncertainty reminds this writer of a line from another story: “It was dark in the woods and she had to be brave.”

Others in the class were metalsmiths. They were well on their way toward making pewter cups. Candlestick holders. Salt shakers. Rachel closed her eyes. It was then that she saw it: a pewter rowboat floating in a book. She worked all week on the boat, its two tiny oars.

Later, back in the familiar kingdom of paper, Rachel made a book for the boat. The boat in the book: what Rachel made reminds this writer of magical books, childhood, the great big endless sea.

The moral of this story is a quotation from the artist herself: “Our ideas are not limited by the materials we know.”

 THE END