Hepworth Gallery print Fair (5th March)

I went to have a gander at the Hepworth print fair and thought it was pretty good, there was some stuff there that I was surprised to see (Nous Vous, Atelier Bingo, Hannah Waldron), although come to think of it I'm not sure why, I suppose because I haven't been to many events such as this before. So, I was annoyed I hadn't put some more money for it, but I still came away with a zine and a risograph print. 

The zine I bought was made by Mark Wheatley (Marko) and is just a collection of black and white abstract images.

http://www.marko.org.uk/about/4578666959

The risograph print was made by Nicolas Burrows, of 'Nous Vous', especially for the print fair and it looks like a very typical piece of 'Nous Vous' style work, lot's of nice slightly wonky shapes in nice colours.   

Book Fair at the Tetley (4th march)

I went for a look around the artist book fair at the Tetley which, whilst it made for a nice day out, was for the large part not to my tastes. There was, however, one stall which I really liked. 'Cafe Royal Books' publish "Weekly photographic (and less frequent other) publications focusing broadly on aspects of change, usually within the UK. Café Royal Books (founded 2005) is an independent publisher based in the North West of England." 

I could have bought the majority of the books they had with them as they all had some pretty good, or at least interesting photographs in them. In the end I decided to get one called 'Archaeology of a Carpet', which appears to be very, very close up photographs of carpets, to the point where they start to look like sort of strange landscapes. It's quite typical of the stuff I like (at least at the moment), and have been looking at in COP and for the picture book I made for Visual Language, where the removal of contextual information, either through lens or just what's included content-wise, contributes to a new or distorted image. 

https://www.caferoyalbooks.com/#/archaeology-of-a-carpet-stephen-mccoy-261115-700/

They were also giving away another of their books - 'No foursomes allowed at peak periods, in Scarborough', with every purchase and that's pretty funny. It manages to perfectly capture the tacky, unpleasant nature of Scarborough, in an often humorous way, but it manages to avoid seeming cruel or taunting.   

https://www.caferoyalbooks.com/#/no-foursomes-allowed-at-peak-periods-in-scarborough-craig-atkinson-250914/