What’s beneath the words: a paper journey

Presented in collaboration with the Bodleian Libraries Centre for
the Study of the Book. Contemporary letterpress artist David Armes
(Red Plate Press) and book conservator Andrew Honey (Bodleian
Libraries) share their appreciation for paper and for the craft and
art that goes into the making of books. Armes explains how he
printed a new book on 'Oxford India Paper,' very thin but opaque
paper used to print Bibles, encyclopaedias, and other lengthy
works. The resulting work, Curses, exploits the paper's unique
qualities. Find out how demanding this was, and hear about Armes's
printing residency in Oxford, where he created the work 'Between
Sun Turns,' a response to the environment and cityscape in and
around the city. It has been thought that ‘Oxford India paper’ was
locally produced at the Wolvercote Paper Mill; Andrew Honey
discusses this idea, and reveals other historical paper research
taking place at the Bodleian. Speaker Biographies: David Armes is
an artist working with print, language and geography. His work is
frequently site-specific and considers how sense and experience of
place can be represented. He works primarily with letterpress
printing on paper and, through using what was once an industrial
process, he is interested in where the multiple meets the unique,
where the ephemeral meets the archival. The final work varies in
form and size from small chapbooks to large hanging scroll
installations. He travels frequently for residencies and worked as
artist-in-residence at Bodleian Libraries at University of Oxford
(2019), Zygote Press fine art printmaking studio, Ohio (2018), BBC
Radio Lancashire (2017) and Huddersfield Art Gallery (2016). He has
recently shown work in the USA, UK and Germany, and was shortlisted
for the 2017 Flourish Excellence in Printmaking award. Andrew Honey
is a book conservator at the Bodleian Libraries with a teaching and
research role. He has recently completed the conservation and
rebinding of the Winchester Bible and is the conservation advisor
to The Mappa Mundi Trust. He has wide interests in the materiality
of rare books and manuscripts, and a particular interest in
historic paper. His paper research has ranged from the writing
papers used by Jane Austen (Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts,
Oxford 2018) to the faults found in the Shakespeare’s First Folio
(‘Torn, wrinkled, stained, and otherwise naughty sheets’ – how
should we interpret paper faults in seventeenth-century paper)