Guarding Bones is a collaboration with Margaret Dietrich who lives diagonally opposite us in Lorraine Drive. She is a keen quilter. When I visited her workspace I realised how it was very much like my own: there was a cutting board, scissors, blades, threads and drawers – each one labelled… then there were the quilts themselves – all those bits of fabric sewn together to make a single piece – collage, again, at work. Margaret both machine and hand sewed the textiles onto the 200gsm Magnani Pescia paper. The original text was hand written and tracks the heart’s false starts, its chance encounters and its dead ends as it wanders and fumbles through the labyrinth of grief. The design of Guarding Bones draws on DeStil and the classic Constructivists: Malevich, El Lissitski, Popova, Klutsis and Rodchenko.

One of the technical challenges I enjoyed was that I did not only have to consider a single/double page spread, but also take into account the eight page section because the stitching was evident both from the front and back of each page.