Laundromatic - the completed prototype

Thank God for deadlines. If it wasn't for the last minute, I swear nothing would get done... :)

This week I completed my first draft of Laundromatic just in time to get it in to the Books.07 exhibition that will be held at the Noosa Regional Gallery in September.

After a morning spent photographing it, here's how it's now looking:

I call it a first draft because the original intent was for a 24-page book (11 spreads plus front and back cover) and while what you see here made the book complete enough for submission to the exhibition, I still have in mind another 2 spreads yet to add in.

I must admit, I'm so thrilled with the way Laundromatic has turned out. While it's taken far more effort and energy to bring about than I initially guessed, I am pleased that it's fulfilling the mental image I had when I set out on the task. As every artist/designer/creative knows, there's always the fear that a project will fall short of your early expectation and end in disappointment, especially when you are entering new creative territories.

If I was to be totally honest, I'd confess that the hardest part of the whole project for me was putting the first page together. It's so completely true that the first step is always the hardest - that first actual moment of committing ideas to page. It's silly when I look back now, but starting Laundromatic was terrifying! After years of gathering photographs and collecting ideas and swirling thoughts around in my head about how it would look, and what it would say, and how I'd actually make it, and how big it would be, and how I'd bind it ... when it actually came time to condense all that thinking and ideating and daydreaming down and then crystallise it into a book, I just didn't know where to start.

So I didn't. I just left it and left it and for months and then years it remained a pile of scribbled notes and sketches and cut-out pictures, until finally I connected the idea of Laundromatic with an actual reason for bringing it into being. The invitation to enter a book into Noosa's annual artist book ehibition became the prompt (and deadline) that I so badly needed. Thank God for deadlines...!

Now is probably the perfect time to say a special thanks to everyone who helped me bring Laundromatic to life - to those who answered my call for written words, and those who supplied my imagination with images and photographs and stories and their support and encouragement. Thank you Dan for being my co-conspirator in the quest for photographs in and of laundromats, despite the countless wierd looks + prying questions of strangers and the wrath of unfriendly laundromat owners. Thank you Simmone and Jo for your pages of paragraphs and lines of wonderful text that kickstarted the book's life and lent structure to the whole design. Thank you Georgi and JD and Tara for your stories, sketches and assorted inspiration. And last and most importantly, a special thanks to all those who raise their hands and now offer to help me print, cut, and sew together 50 copies of this darn book...!! (please, please, please...anyone?)...

Comments

[Miss Dot]

Oh I wish I could actually see it in person, it looks fantastic! if I wasn't all the way over the other side of the country I would go to the exhibition and put my hand up for duty, I love it that much. So, you are printing 50? does that mean they will be for sale? how on earth are you going to price them? argggggggg well done. Can I send you a pic of a sign at a local laundry?