2012 Leap

 

When I was studying Children’s Book Illustration I became aware of new ways people were accessing stories; the kindle had just come on to the market and there were new developments in online story telling; I found this exciting but I began to view books as a slightly fragile endangered species and a good symbol for time passing.

So at the end of 2011 I decided to make a small book for every day of 2012; I started with a velvet covered book on the first of January, filled with pictures of things I hoped to have plenty of during the year.

The rules that I formulated as the year progressed were: if I missed a day I had to make two books the next day, when I started a book, or set of books, I had to finish on that day. I saw each book as part of a growing time line linking to the day I started the project but also providing little touch stones, reminders of the process of making and of what was going on in my personal life and the rest of the world while I was making them; this was further enhanced by using materials from our daily lives: ferry tickets, fabric my grandmother had given me, cereal packets, whatever came to hand. I realised that one of the things I like about books is that they move, they are objects in space so I made some short animations. At the end of the year, a leap year, I had 366 little books and I showed them a few times in a second hand museum cabinet borrowed from Letchworth Heritage Foundation, calling the group ‘Leap’ to acknowledge the leap year and also the way books make me feel.