Book artist: Kate Black

Artist: Kate Black
Websites:
Kate Black
Flickr album
I fell in love with book arts in the mid 1990s, when I started self- publishing zines. My projects then were text heavy and bound in a simple saddle stitch or pamphlet binding style. Five or six years later, I started to make one-off books with experimental bindings that often included bolts and interesting hardware. One can only make so many of those books with dangerous spines before storage becomes an issue.

During college, I learned more practical & lasting binding methods, like coptic sewings. These were perfect for my sketchbooks –I often trashpicked half-used pads of drawing paper from the hallways of my school (the interior & fashion design departments were the most wasteful!) and rebound the unused sheets. My “trash books” were 100% recycled, from the text blocks to the covers I made from found mat- board and covered with more found fliers, sketches and magazine pages.

Today, I still love to make one-off sketchbooks for myself and others, as well as more conceptual pieces with items found close to home. At the core, all of my books are about documenting life. My blank sketchjournals are made to accommodate and to encourage the documentation of  experiences to come. My books of found objects and books with content exist as documents of a finite time period and place which I hope will be remembered.