lone goose press

In April 2015, Sandy Tilcock and Portland artist Margot Thompson used a 2-week residency at PLAYA, on Summer Lake in central Oregon to develop Poking Around. This limited-edition artist’s book is based on an essay by Kathleen Dean Moore on the value of wandering with curiosity.

This book is imbued with the Playa landscape both physically and conceptually. Sandy and Margot walked the lake shore and hiked the nearby forests, observing, photographing and collecting, practicing the kind of mindful exploration the essay celebrates. Back in their studios, they developed the images and design ideas for the book. Margot’s drawings embrace the patterns of the lake bed and objects found on their daily forays. They used crushed sandstone from Winter Ridge to create a slurry which was brushed on paper to create the earthy background for the pages. This texture was reproduced digitally to produce the edition.

The text type is Gill Sans and the display type is Castellar. An Epson 4880 ink jet printer was used to print the page backgrounds. The type and drawings were printed from photopolymer relief plates on a Vandercook 219 proof press. Papeterie Saint-Armand of Montréal, Québec, Canada, made the paper, Canal white. The cover paper, Red Walnut, is a handmade paper from Cave Papers of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Sandy Tilcock hand-colored the title and paragraph breaks. Margot Voorhies Thompson decorated the covers and Sandy Tilcock executed the binding.

To learn more about Tilcock’s and Thompson’s collaborative residency at PLAYA read Catherine Woodard’s Best American Poetry blog post from October 9, 2015.

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