Les Avantures de Gil Blas de Santillane
by M. le Sage [1749] (4 volumes) | 2005               
126 x 79mm

Gold-tooled limp paper bindings sewn on alum-tawed thongs and tooled in Moongold leaf and gold leaf.

Photography (i) by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
photography (ii & iii) by Kathy Abbott
Private Collection

The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne
by Gilbert White [1789] | 2005                           
263 x 210 x 48mm

Bound in chestnut brown goatskin, gold-tooled in yellow gold leaf.   

Photography by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
Private Collection

The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter | 2005                           
214 x 146 x 19mm

Paper case binding with drummed on covers with red goatskin leather onlays.          

Photography by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
Private Collection

Cash | 2005                                      
166 x 91 x 11mm

Incised gilded gesso wall panel on wood.

Photography by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
Private Collection

Poisonous Plants - Deadly, Dangerous and Suspect
by John Nash | 2004
306 x 202 x 19mm

Bound in native yellow goatskin, tooled in black carbon.

Photography by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
Private Collection

Earl of Rochester warrant [1678] | 2004
245 x 192 x 9mm

Non-adhesive hand-coloured paper binding, gold-tooled in Moongold leaf.

Photography by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
Nicholas Fisher Collection

Buff | 2004
102 x 196 x 5mm

Wall panel covered in turquoise goatskin with leather inlays. 

Photography by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
Private Collection

Artist’s notes This small tablet hovers between picture, text and object. It is all three things. It wants to be on a wall and it wants to be read and it wants to be handled. It is by Tracey Rowledge, an English bookbinder, who works with the array of traditional bookbinding skills to make books and wall panels of striking originality. Rowledge is immersed in the textuality of the world. She is an urban archaeologist, looking at the marks on plastic travel cards, discarded shopping lists, graffiti. She has used found texts and she has found used texts before. She also, as in this case, uses her own marks.
Her work takes the throw-away, the immediate moment of a scribble or a random mark and then painstakingly investigates it through the inlay of different leathers, or of gilding. Two kinds of time are brought together. Just as the random moment of the original mark making is scrutinised, so too is the extended and elaborate, careful, poised re-creation of it.
Written by Edmund de Waal, for Think Tank ‘Languages’ papers and exhibition 2005.

Ulysses by James Joyce | 2004
261 x 212 x 64mm

Bound in terracotta goatskin with turquoise leather recessed onlays.

Photography by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
Private Collection

The Seasons by James Thomson [1785] | 2004
128 x 74 x 18mm

Non-adhesive hand-coloured paper binding, gold-tooled in Caplain gold leaf.

Photography by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
Private Collection

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Artist's Notes
I am a founding member of an international bookbinding collective called Tomorrow’s Past, which was formed in 2003. Our guiding principle is that if an antiquarian book is beyond repair, then it is an opportunity to rebind the book with modern sensibilities, using all our knowledge as bookbinders to devise the best structure to suit the needs of any given book.  The structures are mainly non-adhesive and are bound in conservation grade materials. The book structures are intelligent and are of our time, our collective aim is to re-bind antiquarian books with the respect these artefacts deserve.
 

Find out more about Tomorrow's Past

TP Facebook

Fidget | 2004
258 x 400 x 28mm

Wall panel covered in native red goatskin, lined with hand-made paper and stretched over a wooden stretcher, tooled in carbon. 

Photography by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
Private Collection

Where | 2003
215 x 513 x 6mm

Wall panel covered in mid blue calfskin, gold-tooled in Palladium leaf.

Photography by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
Private Collection

I Love Tiggy to much | 2002
420 x 315 x 20mm

Wall panel covered in mid green goatskin, tooled in gold leaf.

Photography by Prudence Cuming Associates Limited
Private collection

Artist’s notes The source material was a green felt tip drawing I made circa 1978 (when I was 8 years old) about our first cat Tiggy. When I found this image I was taken by the juxtaposition of the touching statement combined with its dynamic composition. Gold tooling gave me a way of capturing the casualness of the drawing. By painstakingly re-creating the image I could explore how an image appears on first viewing/reading in contrast to the process with which it was made.

Calisto by J. Crowne [1675] | 2002
215 x 179 x 16mm

Bound in mottled green goatskin, tooled in Caplain gold leaf.

Photography by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
Nicholas Fisher Collection

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Artist's note
For this commission I needed to balance the relative fragility and age of the text-block with the contemporary binding I felt was right for it.  How I want a book to look is never more important than thinking about how best to respond to the physical needs of the text-block: the thought process for both goes hand in hand.

I sewed the text-block on a concertina guard, which was then sewn on archival tapes. It was then rounded, but not backed, and laced on to light-weight boards made of laminated hand-made paper. I then proceeded with binding the book as normal for a fine binding. The image and colour scheme reflect the story of Calisto: a nymph who turns into a star. The image came from a dirty piece of paper which I enlarged on a photocopier, I chose the leather because it looked like an arial view of earth. So, across the cover you have the sense of looking up at the stars, whilst at the same time looking down to earth. The end result is a binding that looks like a normal full-leather fine binding but which opens completely flat, with no adhesive directly on the spine-folds of the sections of the text-block, and therefore under no strain. This binding enabled me to explore and develop my definition of what a fine binding can look and feel like whilst striking a balance between old and new.

Diptych | 2000
110 x 170 x 4mm (each)

Two wall panels covered in baby pink goatskin, with grey goatskin recessed onlays.              

Photography of first image by Prudence Cuming Associates Limited
Photography of remaining images by Jonathan Parsons Private Collection

Artist’s Notes (written 2024)

It’s in the coming together of certain and very specific elements that making a new work becomes possible. I had been working with found material for some years when in 2000 I came across two London Underground tube tickets, each with a drawing made in Biro pen. These images fit my working criteria at the time; they were un-authored spontaneous mark-making which held a particular energy and dynamic quality. I was also engaged by the composition of the drawings framed by the dimension of the tube tickets. Having found this material, I archived them as source material from which to possibly work at a later date.

Diptych, as with so many of my works, uses the processes and skills associated with bookbinding and gold tooling to explore the spontaneous nature of a gestural image. My method was that the size of the artwork was to scale with the dimension of the source material and the placement of the image within the rectangular panel was also to scale. My aim was to get inside the intent of an image and give it a greater depth of meaning. The image was built using the exacting process-driven technique of recessed onlays (used to decorate book covers). This slow and meticulous process of remaking results in the presentation an ephemeral image, creating a juxtaposition between how it looks and how it’s made, allowing for the work to be read and re-read, to be loaded with the original movement and intent, yet be held in a state of suspense by the non-gestural process with which it was made.

3 Milk  | 2000               
500 x 144 x 5mm

Wall panel covered in black goatskin, gold-tooled.

Photography by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
Private Collection

Artist’s Notes - Portrayal of a jotting

This work depicts a shopping list in the form of a gold-tooled leather-covered wall panel. It’s the first in a series and was inspired by the growing number of jottings on paper which I collected from pavements and supermarket trolleys in London. 

The panels recreate defunct, ephemeral, disregarded memory joggers, only of use to the person who wrote them and then threw them away, now having completed their shopping.  To me, they are poetic moments in time, intimate pieces of social history written in biro, pencil or felt tip.  These panels enabled me to push the play between the appearance of gestural mark‑making and the distinctly non-gestural process of gold tooling, using the unsuspecting shopper, maker of lists, as the visual source. 

These works are also about the metamorphosis from the functional, informative nature of a document into something with meaning and references beyond the original source material. The craft driven processes primarily rooted in bookbinding enabled me to pay homage to our need and love to shop by giving a redundant shopping list an icon like status.

Patrick | 2000
32 x 49 x 7mm

Wall panel covered in mottled grey goatskin with leather onlays.                   

Photography by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
Private Collection

Artist's Notes
Patrick by Tracey Rowledge
One morning, toward the end of the year 2000, I was making my way to my studio in Coronet Street and was walking along Tabernacle Street, when I noticed and picked up a scuffed and dirty eraser from the pavement. It had 'Patrick' written on it in blue, and was drawn like a tag. I assumed a schoolboy had once owned it and must have dropped it on his way to or from school, as there was a boys school in the same road.

The image on the eraser looked like it had been written in blue and black biro, just like I'd done during boring lessons at school. The composition of the image was interesting, as was the overall shape and size of the object. I came to the decision that I’d create an art work from this found object. The artwork I resolved to make, was to be a size for size leather-covered wall panel, with the image re-created using recessed onlays, with an onlay in black, royal and navy blue goatskin.

Some weeks after the completion of Patrick, a friend came to my studio and I showed him Patrick. Now the story becomes more interesting, as soon after, my friend went to a shop off Carnaby Street, London, where they sold clothing as well as limited edition artworks. He spotted Patick on the wall, but it wasn’t be me! My friend was puzzled by this and so told me what had happened.

I went to the shop as soon as I could to see their Patrick. They confirmed my worst fear of working with found material – that the original Patrick eraser had been one of an edition made by an artist called Simon White. Unfortunately, they had sold their last Patrick, so without seeing it I couldn't be sure that my found object was a discarded artwork or not. I telephoned Simon White, and we established that I had in fact re-created a limited edition art work by him, and the reason that I found it outside a bar in Tabernacle Street was that from time to time they had corporate evenings there and gave away limited edition artworks, and his erasers were among the 'freebies' one night. He also told me that the image on the eraser had come from a photograph he had taken of a piece of graffiti in the London Bridge/Borough area. So he found the Patrick tag, and used it to create a limited edition eraser (printed by Staedtler) I then found one, and created Patrick as described above.

Simon White gave me permission to sell my Patrick, on the condition that it was a unique artwork and that it would be accompanied by a text explaining its history. So when Patrick did sell I wrote this account of how my Patrick came into being.

Robert The Bruce by Caroline Bingham | 2000
238 x 164 x 44mm

Bound in native red goatskin, tooled in Caplain gold leaf.

Photography by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
Collection of The National Library of Scotland, UK 

Georgie | 2000
360 x 360 x 27mm

Wall panel covered in alum-tawed calfskin, lined with hand-made paper and stretched over a wooden stretcher, tooled in various metal and gold leaf.

Photography by Prudence Cuming Associates Limited
Private collection

The Winter's Tale  by William Shakespeare | 1999
219 x 145 x 27mm

Bound in dark green mottled goatskin, tooled in Moongold leaf.

Photography by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
Private Collection

A Satyr Against Mankind
by The Earl of Rochester [1679] | 1999
287 x 203 x 14mm

Bound in chestnut brown goatskin, sewn on a stub, with leather-jointed endpapers, rounded and backed and tooled in gold leaf.

Photography by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
Nicholas Fisher Collection

Unique Road Print Books: The Green Bar, Top Floor, ?, Ptember, 400, See Mark, Red Blue, Wish, To Lee, 70% Mohair, Ished, Claims Made

A collaboration with Ti Parks 1998
165 x 139 x 4mm

Pamplet bindings, covered in paper-backed reclaimed cloth (from the backings of antiquarian maps).

Photography by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd ?, 70% Mohair, Red Blue, See Mark in Private collections

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Ti Parks and Tracey Rowledge have a very specific and common interest in found scraps of discarded paper usually with marks on them either in the form of fragments of writing or accidental scuffs.

Parks rescues his finds and uses them as single items on a page in series of road print books.  Cathy Courtney, in her article on Ti Parks in Art Monthly writes: ‘Some of the elements used act simply as surfaces and colours, scraps of paper divorced from their original purpose, one is a folded note which Parks has never opened, others give a taste of strangers’ lives.  “Next time I’ll remember the ham if you remember the duvet cover” reads one enigmatic message.’

Rowledge stores her finds in an archive then carefully selects and reworks fragments of usually handwritten words or single letters or figures which sometimes have been scribbled over purposefully.  These are then transferred onto bindings using many different custom made tools and gold leaf.

When Parks and Rowledge met in 1996, their common interest resulted in a number of collaborations.  In 1997 they produced two unique books, with gold tooled alum-tawed goatskin bindings, called Harry Helen – found road prints from Blackheath and I Saw Jamie Maclean – road prints. Then in September of 1998 they made a series of ten road print books with reclaimed linen bindings from the backs of antique maps.

Ti Parks 1998

Towel (edition of 5)
A collaboration with Jonathan Parsons | 1998
100 x 150 x 8mm

A bookless binding, covered in alum-tawed goatskin, with an alum-tawed calfskin joint and doublures, tooled in blue and black carbon.

Photography by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd

Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot
(The Rampant Lions Press 1996) | 1997
382 x 288 x 34mm

Bound in black goatskin, rough-edge gilt, with leather-jointed hand-coloured endpapers, rounded-only spine and gold-tooled.

Photography by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
Private Collection

Notes
"A brush charged with black ink touches down onto white paper, making a quartet of marks. The long marks are angled at sixty degrees to each other, but they do not touch. The short marks act like full-stops to the long.

Reproduced in gold on the front board of the full black goatskin binding of Four Quartets, the longest mark breaks the fore-edge below the top right-hand corner, from a starting point just left of centre. Tooling for a total of thirty six hours, Tracey Rowledge used thirteen pallets of various lengths and widths, plus eight irregular shapes to achieve her powerful and unique statement.

Burnt Norton, the first of Eliot's Four Quartets begins:                               

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction...

This remarkable binding offers a visual abstraction wholly appropriate to Eliot's compelling masterpiece. In time past, its execution would have fascinated Samuel Pepys who, in 1668, watched his bookbinder '...and his manner of gilding of books with great pleasure'. Back in time present, this is surely a dream book-package for that mythical desert island!"

Personal choice: A book decorated with gold, by Ivor Robinson (The New Bookbinder, Vol 20, 2000)

Harry Helen – found road prints from Blackheath
A collaboration with Ti Parks1997

235 x 259 x 23mm 

Bound in semi-limp alum-tawed goatskin, with long stitch sewing, tooled in gold leaf.

Photography by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd

Private Collection

Auggie Wren's Christmas Story by Paul Auster with an illustration by Brian Cronin (Delos Press 1991) | 1997

271 x 195 x 19mm

Bound in native red goatskin, rough-edge gilt, sewn on a stub, with leather-jointed endpapers, rounded and backed and gold-tooled in Caplain gold leaf.

Photography by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
Private Collection

Metamorphoses by Ovid | 1996
502 x 340mm

Bound in mid blue goatskin, with distressed gilded and gauffered edges, tooled in Palladium and three types of gold leaf.

Photographer by A. C. Cooper Ltd
Private Collection

He Gestured Toward Her | 1996
A collaboration with Jonathan Parsons
396 x 1200mm

Double wall panel covered in black goatskin, tooled in gold and Palladium leaf.

Photography by Jonathan Parsons
Private Collection

Artist’s notes

Jonathan Parsons I met as undergraduates at Goldsmiths’ College London (1989-1992), where we forged a lasting friendship, whilst also establishing visual common ground in the form of the exploration of mark making via laborious craft practices, including drawing, painting and gold tooling on leather. This ongoing enquiry into the re-creation of gestural images via non-gestural processes and technique has to date resulted in two collaborations, this work and Towel 1998. This black leather-covered double wall panel has been tooled in gold and palladium leaf, using 12 brass hand finishing tools from 0.5 to 2mm in width and various lengths as well as 7 irregular shaped tools. A number of these finishing tools were made specifically for this work. He gestured toward her was first shown at the Richard Salmon Gallery, London, 1996, in an exhibition of Jonathan’s work, then in an exhibition called Craft at the same gallery in 1997, which later toured to Kettles Yard, Cambridge. The exhibition was curated by Paul Heber-Percy and Joan Key.

Ulysses by James Joyce | 1996
199 x 119mm

Bound in chestnut brown goatskin, tooled in blind, Palladium and four types of gold leaf.

Photography by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
Private Collection

Artist's Notes 2024
I came across bookbinding* when I was creatively adrift. I’d not long completed a fine art degree at Goldsmiths College, where I’d spent my time navigating critical theory and exploring mark-making. Intuitively, I felt that studying bookbinding was what needed to come next for me. The major turning point came during my first year at studying for a Diploma in Fine Bookbinding and Paper Conservation (at Guildford College, Surrey, UK), when I saw the work of the late Ivor Robinson. It was in this moment that I knew I could continue my exploration of mark-making via the non-gestural and extremely meticulous method of gold tooling on leather. This in turn led me to see that bookbinding could be a creative end in itself. I suppose at that time I had appreciated the intrinsic part that craft played in art but somehow hadn’t until the Ivor moment appreciated the art in craft!

The image across the cover came from a scribble on the back of a postcard.  At that time the images I used were found, mainly on my journeys to and from the studio. This multi-layered image felt right for ‘Ulysses’, it contained a particular energy and intent, which for me aligned with that of the text. Each of the seven scribbles is distinguished by being tooled in blind, Palladium leaf, four types of gold including Moongold and Vert Fonce gold leaf and the shortest line is a combination of all the gold leaves.

This binding broke new ground for me and remains as relevant and significant to me now as it did then.

Early on, bookbinding felt like an uncomfortable fit and I was unsure how long I’d continue with it, but here I am, still fully engaged with it. Looking back brings an awareness of my on-going relationship with gold tooling, I feel I’m keyed into its history, its language, whilst also deepening my exploration and ways to hold, capture and embody the emotional intent of movement in line form.

*as a result of my dad who worked as a carpenter and at the time was working with an architect and son of the late bookbinder and Finisher John Mitchell. It’s also thanks to the late Maureen Duke, who before it had even crossed my mind, offered me a place on the full-time bookbinding diploma course at Guildford College. These people, these events set in motion a change of direction.