Amsterdam/Tokyo (6 – part II)

While Yoko was producing the beautiful pages in the ‘[amsterdam]’ notebook of our long-distance MUJI notebook collab (featured in this post a couple of weeks ago) I was enjoying working in the other / ‘[tokyo]’ notebook. Yoko had previously provided this trigger for my next entry…

… and I leapt at the opportunity to raid my stash of postage stamps amassed over the decades – soaked off correspondence received from distant friends and family, flea-market finds etc. While sifting through this trove I restricted my selection to stamps with animal or vegetable themes and collaged them onto the notebook’s left page.

notebook [tokyo] – work in progress

Then I chose eight of my favourites (chosen for their excellent animal subjects and not, in the case of some, for the pernicious colonial legacies they represent) to use as the basis for a series of black and white ink drawing exercises exploring pattern, texture, positive/negative space… and fun!

bull-headed shrike (japan, 1998)

7th century celtic dog (ireland, 1971)

sloane’s viper fish (congo, 1961)

chameleon (ghana, 1967)

gologolo / sun squirrel (malawi, 1984)

To give my failing eyesight a fighting chance I made the drawings at a larger scale than they would finally (re)appear in the notebook… then scanned, scaled down, printed and ‘stitched’ them back into the notebook using bright embroidery thread.

notebook [tokyo] – work in progress

notebook [tokyo] – work in progress

notebook [tokyo] – work in progress

notebook [tokyo] – double page spread  |  back side of stitching

notebook [amsterdam] denotes the notebook that started its life in Amsterdam, and notebook [tokyo] denotes the notebook that started its life in Tokyo.

The preceding Amsterdam/Tokyo project posts can be found here:
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6 – part I)