Byrne’s big pop-up book /  by Shirley Accini

John Byrne’s pop-up book stage set for The Cheviot, The Stag and The Black, Black Oil, on display at the V&A Dundee. Photo Shirley A

John Byrne used cardboard to create his giant pop-up stage set for the play The Cheviot, The Stag and The Black, Black Oil, which travelled around Scotland in the 1970s. It has five double-page spreads that open to reveal the scenery for the play. On permanent display at the V&A Dundee, you can go up close to the work and see in detail what it is made from – reinforced cardboard, string, plywood.

Close up, the book’s pages are made from reinforced cardboard, and its spine from plywood and string. Photo Shirley A

This artwork speaks to me on two levels: the materials were used because of their simplicity and practicality, allowing the theatre group to quickly assemble the stage set, change scenes, fold it away, and then transport it from venue to venue. In the same way that Byrne’s use of ‘poor’ materials and the sceneries’ loose, child-like painting style emphasise the economic background of when the play was set, my cardboard forms belie the project’s subtext of a child using play to work through anxieties, as Melanie Klein posited: “It is when a child plays with the small toys that we can see the expression of opposing emotions most distinctly.”1

The pages of a giant pop-up book will set a human-scale scene for viewers to contemplate as they would an installation, by completely immersing them in the narrative. The turning of the page to the next scene continues the story: cardboard’s lightness and strength will allow this for a work of this size.

1 Melanie Klein, Narrative of a Child Analysis: The Conduct of the Psycho-Analysis of Children as Seen in the Treatment of a Ten-year-old Boy, (London: Virago, 1989), p67.

Bookbinder: Amelie Genestine-Charlton /  by Shirley Accini

To further develop my pop-up sketchbook using cardboard rather than paper, I sought advice from bookbinder Amelie Genestine-Charlton, who is based local to me in Crystal Palace. We discussed my project in general and, while she’d never created a pop-up book, she advised on binding techniques, and the materials and tools required, in particular the importance of grain direction, folding, use of bone folders and stockists of large-scale paper and card (John Purcell, Stockwell; Shepherds, Victoria; London Centre for Book Arts, Hackney Wick).

 Two ways to bind a book:

  • Sewn on the fold to enable the book to lie flat

  • With a clasp, similar to thesis binding

For a pop-up book, which would contain extra paper/card and materials, I need to consider creating compensation – space – inside the bind, particularly for the bulk of cardboard. Grain direction (the direction of cardboard’s flutes) will help with folding and must run parallel to the spine, and a bone folder (for cardboard, large, plastic rulers perhaps) will aid sharp creasing. A combination of stitching and glue – PVA DEV289 Hewitts – will hold the sections together.

Bone folders - key tools used by bookbinders to make sharp folds in paper. Photo Shirley A


Books, envelopes and a brave new world /  by Shirley Accini

Books and storytelling have always been important to me. While my parents had little interest in art, they encouraged reading and I devoured everything – from comics and magazines to novels, literature and encyclopaedias – as a means of escape, adventure and seeing worlds beyond my own. The power that fiction can have in transporting the self from one world to another is, as Mike Nelson describes: “… the fact that you could be sitting in an armchair and yet be on the high seas or in a war. The potential of trying to unleash that in a sculptural form is very exciting.”1

Books influencing my project were many, but particularly the following children’s publications for their ability to still excite me today:

  • Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe. Shipwrecked on a tropical island, Crusoe built his own kingdom from the island’s resources.

  • The Secret Garden and A Little Princess, Frances Hodgson Burnett. The child protagonists, having experienced traumas, go on to create their own worlds, real and imaginary.

  • The Broons (top right). A comic-strip Scottish family, who held great affection for each other, despite life’s everyday challenges.

More contemporary books include:

  • Cougar Annie’s Garden, Margaret Horsfield (bottom right). The real-life story of an early 20th-century pioneer who, despite hardships, created a nursery garden in the wilds of Vancouver Island.

  • People from my Neighbourhood, Hiromi Kawakami. Based in Japan, this collection of short stories is narrated by a child who describes the quirky incidents of friends in her local area that combine the real with the fantastical.

This pastime was crucial during the Covid lockdowns and online purchases poured through the letterbox. But not only were the books important for feeding my mind; the large amount of packaging I accumulated was the trigger for reactivating my practice. I was particularly attracted to the malleability of the beige-coloured mailer envelopes, which I would dismantle for surfaces to draw on, and rip apart and reassemble to make collages and naïve-style greetings cards. The ‘beigeness’ is important for me as a sculptural material, as I found with my cardboard project Prelude in second year, because it allows: 1, the artist to see the item’s potential beyond its present manifestation; and 2, the viewers to develop their own relationship with the artwork.

The first pop-up element of the first lockdown sketchbook (background) based on my dissertation topic of afternoon tea. Photo Shirley A

With my life-long love of reading and immersing myself in stories, a book being incorporated into the major project was inevitable. Turning it into a sculptural form began as a way of setting my dissertation topic, afternoon tea, in a 3D format, with the mechanics of reading – the turning of pages – and the anticipation of what the next page will reveal crucial elements in expanding viewers’ involvement with my work. I also wanted to include my origami exercises, another lockdown project, as pop-up elements that will add extra dimensions of interactivity, curiosity and surprise.

A giant pop-up book excites me, and given that installations are my practice, setting it within its own story will allow the story to be expanded through pop-up structures, and secret hidey holes and doors that open to reveal other narrative details.

1 Mike Nelson in ‘How artist Mike Nelson turns traffic cones, old vehicles, and outdated machines into art’, Art Basel, <https://www.artbasel.com/stories/meet-the-artists-mike-nelson> accessed 8 May 2023

Artists’ books /  by Shirley Accini

My pop-up sketchbook represents a naive form of making, trying to recapture the child’s energy and intense imagination during creativity. This method allows me to produce quickly without getting bogged down in detail and striving for perfection, and often incurs accidents that add a fresh perspective to the work.

The sketchbook reminded me of the university library’s artists’ books collection, which includes big names such as Christian Boltanski (Ost West), Sturtevant (Finite Infinite) and Les Bicknell (The Book of Art). Reflecting my use of readymades and detritus, I was particularly drawn to Sturtevant’s book, which was based on the mantra ‘Remake, Reuse, Reassemble, Recombine’, and Jon Bentley’s Book of Discarded Things. Size A5 and handmade, it looks at first glance as though it had been made in a slap-dash way, with a cover that houses a collection of discarded blue objects – Smarties lids, a broken peg, Bic pen, toothbrush, random pieces of fabric and plastic – and is tied together with two pieces of ragged ribbon. Bentley’s creation follows the traditional format in that it has pages, a cover, end pages and a spine, but its draw is its unpretentious yet carefully considered aesthetic that elevates the status of items deemed rubbish.  

John Bentley’s Book of Discarded Things (front cover). Photo Shirley A

Book of Discarded Things (back cover). Photo Shirley A

Continuing a line of work /  by Shirley Accini

My new project is, of course, not new. It continues a line of work that I’d previously investigated – Prelude and High Tea for the Birthday Boy, which were based on Freud’s ‘Narcisissm of Small Things’, where small communities share commonalities and are, therefore, likely to engage in petty feuds because of their hypersensitivity to the minor differences perceived in each other.1 I experienced this kind of behaviour in my own family, which as a child I found upsetting.

Prelude, 2018. Although each figure is a personality in its own right, the simplicity and blandness of these cardboard silhouettes allow viewers a personal relationship with the works. Photo Shirley A

In creating these works, my focus was on handling the materials as freely and quickly as a child would, with their imagination racing ahead of the making. While this was the case with the cardboard, I found making the papier-mache tea party onerous, and this was reflected in the finished piece, which came across as turgid as the PVA that held it all together. In fact, the only feature of High Tea that I was pleased with was the handheld-shot film of a real birthday party that was projected onto it.

The cardboard allowed me to work quickly and simply, and this light way of working was reflected in hanging silhouettes that moved gently in a breeze, from draughts or people walking among them. I want to continue this lightness into the major project.

  1. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, (London: Hogarth Press, Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1963), p. 315

High Tea for the Birthday Boy recreates a family tea party seen through the eyes of a child at the point when the polite behaviour of the participants descends into chaos. The naive style reflects the mind of a child trying to process an upsetting situation. Photo Shirley A

Reflection as a starting point /  by Shirley Accini

My year out from university in 2020-21 was a period of intense reflection, spent looking back at the previous year’s studies and working out how to develop my work into the third, and final, year. Covid had a huge effect on my practice – firstly, with the enforced lockdowns; and secondly, catching Covid early on in the pandemic and enduring Long Covid for another 18 months. Being ill and confined to home with restricted access to materials, libraries and places to visit, meant I had to radically re-evaluate my art practice, both mentally and physically.

Restrictions and safe havens, for child and adult
It was also a period of reflection on life in general and I couldn’t help comparing my situation to when I was a child of around 7-8 years: restricted to the small world of the home and local neighbourhood, under the control of family, and becoming increasingly aware of the huge, scary unknown place that was the outer world. Looking back, I was always frustrated by my lack of voice and inability to articulate how I felt about the world. I was creative but this, too, was restricted: I didn’t have money or access to art materials other than cheap crayons, felt pens and, occasionally, my father’s precious coloured pencil set that I was rarely allowed to use. But I was lucky in having a grandmother who was interested in arts and crafts - we would spend every Thursday afternoon watching Blue Peter and the weekends making the show’s projects - and it was her use of household detritus such as cardboard boxes, DIY equipment and gardening materials to make her creations that inspires me today.

Penelope Puppet, the first Covid lockdown project made using household detritus. Photo Shirley A

The context of my practice lies in reflections of awkward, uncomfortable scenarios: a family gathering that goes horribly wrong, cruel taunts in the school playground, petty jealousies and perceived slights – picking up on the theory of RD Laing, who believed that family and close friends were major contributors to children being diagnosed as schizophrenic.1 As a child, I coped with such traumas by immersing myself in imaginary worlds influenced by the culture I consumed – books, television, cinema and pop music. I built dens with available materials – cardboard boxes, newspapers, old clothes and curtains. Fun and hugely satisfying to make, my dens also had a deeper underlying context, for it was in these spaces that I would replay awkward scenarios from real life. These dens and my role-plays allowed me to contemplate and assert my place in society, and thus achieve a sense of control, empowerment and independence.

The imaginary games would often take place in a secret den that I had created based on a tropical island or overgrown fantasy garden. As an adult, the garden is important for me as a place to think, create and nurture, and as such is a safe haven, particularly so during the Covid lockdowns. Plants play a huge part in a garden but, more than anything, by incorporating them into my project it becomes, as Piet Oudolf describes: “… about emotion, atmosphere, a sense of contemplation… to move people with what I do. You look at this, and it goes deeper than what you see.”2

Piet Oudolf “plants like an artist paints”3: At Hauser & Wirth, Somerset, the Oudolf Field in bloom provides broad brush strokes of colour from a palette of perennials and grasses that merge the landscape with the artworks inside the gallery. Photo Magnus Dennis/Urquhart & Hunt

As I planted, deadheaded, weeded and pruned, I tried to make sense of this new world and put anxieties into perspective. In doing so, a future presented itself. I also spent a lot of time reading and as my online book-buying increased during this time, I accumulated a small mountain of the cardboard mailer envelopes that my online purchases came in. These beige-coloured packs and their malleability caught my imagination. The slower pace of life combined with my reading, gardening and gentle art-making spawned an idea for my final year project.

  1. RD Laing and Aaron Esterson, Sanity, Madness and the Family. [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970].

  2. Piet Oudolf in Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf, directed by Thomas Piper (Five Seasons Media LLC, 2022).

  3. Noel Kingsbury in Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf, directed by Thomas Piper (Five Seasons Media LLC, 2022).

The first pop-up of the first lockdown sketchbook (background) based on my dissertation topic of afternoon tea. Photo Shirley A

BA Fine Art - the final stretch /  by Shirley Accini

Now in my sixth year studying part time for a BA Fine Art, the end is fast-approaching and, having completed my dissertation last year, this is the time where I focus on my final project.

For the next few months I’ll be detailing here my ideas, inspiration, research, experimentation and decision-making that go into producing the final artwork that will be shown in June/July 2023.