ABC with Pinocchio Linocut book

September 23, 2011

ABC with Pinocchio

I’ve just finished my latest artist’s book and it’s currently on show/for sale on the KALEID editions stall at the London Art Book Fair at the Whitechapel Gallery. It’s called ABC with Pinocchio and features the little puppet making the shapes of the alphabet. After a while he starts to forget his ABCs and gets letters back to front and upside down. By the time he reaches the last few letters of the alphabet he gives up entirely and just throws random shapes.

Pinocchio ABC – the letter X

To make Pinocchio I carved each body part individually out of lino then inked them up and arranged them into the shape I wanted.  Here’s Pinocchio waiting to be inked up and looking quite chilled out.

Linocut body parts

The lino pieces were printed onto Chinese calligraphy paper which has a lovely, slightly wonky-looking grid of red lines on it.  This gives it the feel of a writing or drawing exercise book and I folded the paper in such a way that each image appears on the left hand page with a blank page on the right so that you could copy each letter if you wanted to.  Finally I printed the title on the cover together with a slightly suggestive reclining Pinocchio, glued all the pages together and bound it in a traditional Chinese pattern.

Pinocchio ABC on the KALEID stall at LAB

You can visit LAB at the Whitechapel for free until Sunday 25th September.