This handmade book was inspired by, and produced during, a 3-month stay in Tokyo in the winter of 2019, with side trips to Kobe, Tokushima, Kaga and Kyoto.

I had the unique opportunity to live in Tokyo rather than simply be a tourist, exploring its neighbourhoods and engaging with people on a daily basis. During that period, I participated in papermaking, indigo dyeing, woodblock printing, brush calligraphy and cyanotype printing.

The title 青写真 BLUE PRINTS means cyanotype or blueprint (青), and pictures (写真); it is pronounced ao shashin in Japanese.

The overarching theme and design of the book, the cyanotype and pigment ink prints and accompanying short poems soon became wabi-sabi along with the colour blue—given the time of year, what I was feeling, perceiving and admiring, as well as the cyanotype printing process I was experimenting with, along with a rudimentary studio setup. However, in the process, I sometimes candidly referred to my project as “wobbly-shabby”, a much more modest version of my original intention.

This is the bound softcover version of the handmade flutterbook.