Stephen Perkins, Sumi Series: #188-195, Sumi ink and leporello, 2025

Because winter is here and its too cold to go out to the garage and work with stencils and spray paint, I decided to experiment inside with Sumi ink and some Chinese brushes. I knew beforehand that I just wanted to make long black lines along the length of the accordion, and here they are!

#188, 8 single-sided pages, individually 5" x 5", and unfolded 3ft 4" 

#189, 8 single-sided pages, individually 5" x 5", and unfolded 3ft 4"

#190, 10 single-sided pages, individually 3.75" x 5.75", and unfolded 3ft 1.5"

              #191, 10 single-sided pages, individually 3.75" x 5.75", and unfolded 3ft 1.5"

               #192, 10 single-sided pages, individually 3.75" x 5.75", and unfolded 3ft 1.5"

                 #193, 10 single-sided pages, individually 3.75" x 5.75", and unfolded 3ft 1.5"

                #194, 10 single-sided pages, individually 3.75" x 5.75", and unfolded 3ft 1.5"

#195, 10 single-sided pages, individually 3.75" x 5.75", and unfolded 3ft 1.5"

R. Clarke-Davis, A Commonplace Book: Thought Baloons for 2025, Kiddi Viddy Press, 2025

front cover

A very cool bookend to the year that depicts Clarke-Davis' quintessentially empty urban landscapes, maybe even crime scenes, with an overlay of Japanese kawaii/chibi style illustrations of cats, stars and fish. The illustrations inject a light hearted theme as they float like holiday decorations, or "thought baloons" above these deserted landscapes. 

16 one-sided pages, individually 2.5" x 4.5", and when unfolded 6ft.

inside of back cover

C. Mehrl Bennett, Cherry Pips & Stems, Luna Bisonte Productions, Columbus, 2024

A witty series of pips and stem assemblages that when sequenced together create a surreal and fluxy world of image & association, and all from the simplest of materials.

15 single-sided pages, individually 2.75" x 2.25" and unfolded 2ft 9.75"

 

Alexis Beauclair, About Series #5, Gloria Glitzer, Berlin, 2016, ed. 100

Gloria Glitzer's periodical "About Series" features a different artist in each issue. She started the publication in 2010 and views it as a mobile exhibition space in which she invites "...an individual or a group of people to develop a work or exhibition exclusively for this space."(1) The format for each issue is the same with a minimal leporello structure of 4 pages accompanied with a small Riso printed pamphlet stitched into the last fold and finally a sticker on the front cover displaying the title and issue number.

This issue features the work of Alexis Beauclair, a well respected French artist whose drawings, comics and illustrations have been published in such venerable places as the New York Times, New Yorker and Bloomberg Businessweek. In 2012, he co-founded with Bettina Henni, a press called Riso Papier Machine [Papier Machine | People of Print] through which he also publishes his own drawing zines and mini comics. With this issue of "About Series" he uses a minimalist aesthetic to interrogate the nature of reading and what constitutes a comic, and by making it nonverbal leaves it to the reader to fill out that space while questioning the basic tenets of what we traditionally understand comics to comprised of.  Beauclair's work would seem to fit squarely within the new artistic movement called "French Abstract Formalist Comics" that first emerged in France during the 2010's. 

Someone who has written extensively about this movement is the comics critic Kim Jooha, and here she outlines some of its essential features and their effect upon the reader, writing "The emotionless and mechanical style and lack of narrative and words lead the reader to focus on the formal qualities and abstract concepts of comics, visual art, and printed media, such as space-time, movement, body, sign, texture, representation, transformation, repetition/difference, etc..."(2) She continues writing that "In the mid-2010s, a group of French artists began creating wordless comics with geometric and minimalist style and little or no narrative. What they show instead is more of a 'process.'"(3)  Beauclair's work would seem to illustrate all of these themes and once these parameters are understood the work doesn't seem quite so impenetrable!

For some other artists in this blog working in a similar manner check out: Nicolas Nadé, Sammy Stein, Laurence Lagier and Editions Matière.

4 single-sided pages, individually 11.75" x 8.25" and unfolded 2ft 9"

Footnotes

1. Source: gloriaglitzer.de/about-series, accessed 12.12.2025

2. Jooha, Kim, "French Abstract Comics (French Structural Comics): An Artistic        Movement," The Comics Journal, November 8, 2018.

3. Ibid.

back cover

Nienke Beukers, Scrabble Elfs, NINOC, Amsterdam, 2022, ed. 50

Nienke Beukers is an artist and art therapist based in the Netherlands. This publication came about from her experimentation with creating stories and poems using Scrabble boards and their wooden letters. This accordion is just one of the spin-offs from this visual research and in this case it led her to create poems with the linked words on a Scrabble board, as well as presenting the words and phrases along the side of each page. 

The themes underlying Beuker's choices of words and phrases all seem to reflect her therapy practice of which she states: 

In my work, I like to focus on strength, vulnerability, difficult emotions, and human struggles. Beauty and ugliness, pain and happiness are some of the contrasts I find important. I enjoy playing with them because they alternate and coexist.

I use visual research to explore how people cope in these times, how they recover from emotional pain caused by overstimulation, loss, injury, or damage, and how they subsequently learn to maintain their boundaries... whether these coping strategies are used consciously or unconsciously.

The goal of this research is to inspire people to reflect on their own resilience and how to further develop it. Because resilience helps people do more than just survive. Exercising, relaxing, enduring inevitable suffering, and simultaneously enjoying it, constitutes the art I call life.  [source: LinkedIn profile]

Follow this link for more about the results Beuker's Scrabble projects and testimonies from people who've engaged with it: ABOUT – Scrabble Stories

6 double-sided pages, individually 6" x 8", and when unfolded 4ft.

reverse side

 

back page

Jurgen Olbrich, Grey, Kassel, Germany, 2025

Front cover

This is not the first modified vintage photo-strip that I've received from Jurgen, with this one taken up with touristic views from around Lake Garda in Italy. Jurgen's 'grey' intervention obscures the views forcing the viewer to scramble for clues of what lies underneath. Ultimately its a futile activity and you reach a point where you just have to accept it for what is is — a series of photographs with daubs of grey paint smeared onto their surfaces. 

12 single-sided pages, individually 2.25" x 3.5" and unfolded 3ft 6".

back cover

leporello with No-Institute envelope

R. Clarke-Davis, A Book of Wander: Tarriff Aware and A Book of Wanderings, Kiddy Viddy Press, 2025

A Book of Wander: Tarriff Aware, 2025 

A cool new accordion from Clarke-Davis, the moody feeling of the work is emphasized by the film sprocket framing which also gives it a sense of movement. The camera becomes witness and documentarian of these darkened spaces of the night, all of which resonates and seems very apropos for the present times.

6 single sided pages, individually 5" x 7" and when unfolded 3ft 6"

Back cover

________________________________________________________________

A Book of Wanderings, 2025

Another in Clarke-Davis' flaneur of the night books in which he documents deserted city streets. The following quote is from this book's end page, "A book of wanderings from the early morning without taxis or uber, if my sister only knew...".

What's interesting for me about this book is its structure, it has been printed in a long strip like an accordion, but both end pages are glued to the cover. The result is an accordion book that you can't open up and it forces the viewer/reader to experience it as a traditional book, although it is ostensibly two different kinds of books. An interesting dilemma for sure!

24 pages, individually 4.25" x 4".

back cover