Cutting, sewing, scanning, printing – a personal design journey into publishing

Mette-Sofie D. Ambeck
Danish designer, Book artist. www.ambeck.mdd.dk
Play (11min) Download: MP4 | MP3

I will discuss how – and why – I self-publish work, often using the most hands-on DIY means, showing examples from early, entirely hand-made, process work, to more recent hybrids of analogue/digital processes. The DIY aesthetic, focused on the intended creative goal, has for me embraced blades, pixels and all points between.

Mette-Sofie D. Ambeck is a Danish designer, book artist, and lecturer who began exhibiting at artists’ book fairs in 2000. She has since exhibited and sold internationally, from Korea to Australia, the USA and Finland. Originally, as a Graphic Design and Communications student at Central Saint Martins, she pursued her interest in making books through traditional means, getting a first taste for letterpress and glue. With a keen eye for computer-generated imagery she has since combined the two. Her distinctive trademark is hand-cutting into paper pages, using the physical structure of the book to direct the reader through a narrative sequence. Experimentation with structures and the influence of light cast on materials has also been vital to her work, which can now be found in many international public collections, including those at the Tate Collection, V&A, Manchester Metropolitan University Library All Saints and Smith College, Massachusetts.