Aluminium Sketchbook | London

Hey, this is the main piece of art which was printed and bound in London during Autumn and Winter (2008/2009). It was made by me and the independent artist, photographer and friend Guy Paterson, who teaches Alternative Photographic Processes at Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design in London.

“Huge and heavy” - that’s what you feel when you get in touch with this sketchbook that collects loads of experimental photographic images. The high contrast images on the top of both aluminium covers were screenprinted with a coating emulsion and then corroded by acid. This pair of images are the positive and negative (in very high contrast) from a digital picture of a common hot water bottle - which symbolically represents the cold of English winter. The black spine was made by a very good leather and a sheet of canvas in the inner side. The pages were bound to the spine with one piece of 7 meter long waxed thread. The main paper is a quite cheap one, called “bread and butter”, commonly used by artists during etching process due its very good resistance to water. Some pages were printed on heavy watercolour paper or light sensitive ones. I hope to post some photos of the pages on a later occasion, showing the techniques and details about the process.

Details of the spine. There are 240 holes here and the amount of pages exceeds 200.

Back cover in which you can see the negative image of the hot water bottle. The dark tones were caused by the acid corrosion process.