In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, widespread lockdowns led many to explore ways to keep themselves busy; largely, this meant finding – or rediscovering – ways of keeping our hands busy. There was the sourdough spike, sure, but people around the world picked up paintbrushes, colouring books, knitting needles and crafting supplies.
There is some irony, then, to the fact that A Handmade Assembly, an annual celebration of the intersection of fine art, community and the handmade that had taken place in Sackville, N.B., since 2011, was unable to continue during the pandemic. Instead, to commemorate the event’s 10th anniversary and to stand in lieu of it, the event’s organizers – the Owens Art Gallery and Struts Gallery & Faucet Media Arts Centre, with the support of the Fine Arts Department at Mount Allison University – commissioned a book of the same name from award-winning designer Lauren Wickware.
Published in 2023, A Handmade Assembly is, Wickware says, not just a record of the exhibition, but also an extension of it. “Even if you never attended the event, you could have a similar experience” by flipping through the book.
This is largely because it’s no ordinary coffee-table tome: A Handmade Assembly is a hardcover chronicle that features images of past exhibitions, collages, knitting patterns and even an image of a hammer, marked up paper doll-style, that encourages readers to rip the page out and fold the hammer into a 3-D paper tool.
The challenge, for Wickware, was to include these disparate elements in a book without it seeming like “a dog’s breakfast” visually. To accomplish this, she borrowed the cut-and-paste look of zines, whose aesthetic naturally lent itself to the variety of works on display within its pages. The Globe and Mail went behind the scenes with Wickware last summer as she put the finishing touches on the book.
