A ghostly moment by Byron Bay’s tea tree lake – from the book Time Out of Place. Photography Rosie Sherwood

Indie publisher and book artist Rosie Sherwood knows what it’s like to live in two worlds – even though she is based in the UK, her love for Australia began at the tender age of two.

Rosie Sherwood always knew she wanted to be an artist – what she didn’t know was what kind of artist. It wasn’t until she was working on her MA in Book Arts at Camberwell College of the Arts in London, that she began to realise that outside of the mainstream art and book worlds, a whole Indie universe exists.

“Artists book fairs really opened a world of community and conversation around art for me,” says 28-year-old Sherwood. “There’s a vast community of people at book fairs who have all looked at the changing art world and the suffering industries and rather than seeing the disaster they’ve seen the potential for something new.”

Book artist Rosie Sherwood with one of her adapted comic books. Photograph Lauren Fried.

As a child, Sherwood straddled two worlds – England, where she grew up, and Australia, her father’s country – where many of her family and friends live. It’s this dichotomy of where we are and where we might want to be, that has informed much of her work, including the beautiful and wistful Time Out of Place, a limited first edition of 25 books, with half the photographs taken around England, and the other half from a trip to Australia during the course of 2010/2011 – including a ghostly image from one of Byron Bay’s local tea tree lakes. (See top)

“The books were made up of loose-leaf pages collected together in a folded box,” Sherwood says. “The idea is that readers can move the pages around – changing not only the order but what you see through each image because the paper is slightly see through. Most of the pages are single sheets, but some are folded so you open them as if you’re turning the pages of a book. The book is a visual exploration of belonging in two places, and of being between the two – it’s about as autobiographical as a series of pictures can be.”

Dyptich England, from Time out of Place

Dyptich Australia from Time out of Place

Having identified that ‘book art’ was her calling, Sherwood has set about combining her two passions for words and images – and space – in a major way. She’s already produced a number of books, including an on-going arts journal Elbow Room. Each of her books is self-produced, printed in her studio and hand-bound. Some are housed at Tate Library and Archive, Chelsea College of Art and Design, The National Gallery of Scotland Library and The Poetry Library or sold at Foyles and thebookartbookshop.

Her next project, The Ellentree, had its genesis many years ago – born from that very under-rated creative impulse – boredom.   “I was at my grandparents house one summer many years ago and I was really bored,” she recalls. “For some reason I decided to make white origami cranes and hang them in their apple tree. As the years passed an idea grew, the birds became coloured, the tree evolved into twisted copper – I wrote my story, and Evelyn began his search for the Ellentree.”

The Ellentree

‘Evelyn is pursuing a trail of fallen bird-leaves from the mystical Ellentree. He must find it or be lost forever.’

The Ellentree tells the story of Evelyn, a young man with an eye of red and purple who walks in two worlds. One is our own; the other, a world of brilliant yet terrible extremes, a place of blurred edges sharp to the touch. To find his way back to our reality, and to the one person who knows he is missing, Evelyn must pursue a trail of leaves – a technicolour flight of birds fallen from a mystical tree. His quest is to find the Ellentree, or be lost forever.

The idea for the story came to Sherwood in the summer of 2009 when she was reading a biography of Neil Gaiman. “I came across the 24-hour comic book challenge, originally created by Scott McCloud as a creative exercise and completed the first draft of The Ellentree in 24 continuous hours.

Sherwood worked on The Ellentree for a year, handing it in as her graduate project and imagining that it was complete, but Gaiman continued to be an inspiration. She sent him a copy of the original book, and his response inspired her to keep working. “I absolutely treasure the meetings and conversations I had with Gaiman,” she says, “they were a major stepping-stone in the path that has led here.”

An origami bird in flight…

The ‘here’ she refers to is to her latest quest – inspired by Amanda Palmer, Sherwood has set up a kickstarter crowdfunding appeal in order to complete her project. “To do it justice, to make this book the beautiful object I dream of, I need professional printers and binders this time around,” says Sherwood.

Sherwood says The Ellentree, named after a childhood friend, who would constantly chastise the teachers at their school for wasting paper, is many things. “It’s a short story, a comic book, a poem and a piece of book art,” she says. “However you look at it, at its heart, The Ellentree is a story told in words and pictures.”

You can support Rosie Sherwood here:  kickstarter.the-ellentree

You can see more about Rosie here: .ayupublishing

You can follow her blog here: rosiesherwood

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