Wednesday, December 17, 2014

A flip and some twisters

Too late for the spoiler alert as you'll already have seen one of the pop up surprises in Judy Millar’s book Swell with Trish Gribben and paper design by Phillip Fickling. Of all the things you might expect to pop up in a kid's book La Maddalena (a neo classical church in Venice and the site of Millar’s Venice Biennale outing in 2009 and Michael Stevenson's Trekka installation in 2003) is probably not high on anyone’s list. But it certainly lets Millar give her work the ultimate indoor-outdoor flow.

The first 3D pop up books as we know them today were probably first produced in the 1930s but the precedent for an artist book like Millar’s is probably Andy Warhol’s 1967 book Index (there 's a copy in the Auckland Art Gallery library from memory) with it’s pop up can of tomato paste.

Swell is also a testament to Boosted which raised enough funding to cover the printing and then some. Swell has been published by Lopdell House Gallery and  you can get a copy here.

Images: Top, Swell by Judy Millar showing the pop up for Giraffe-Bottle-Gun, Middle, Judy Millar’s studio via OTNSTUDIO and bottom, Andy Warhol Index book