The purpose of this blog is to publicise the idea and the practice of the artist’s scrapbook which, unlike the sketchbook, has been much less addressed, while serving both as a tool in the process of art production, and an outcome in its own right.  In this context, ‘scrapbook’ does not assume a physical artefact; it could also take the form of an online space sharing many aspect of its predecessor’s structure.

And the aim of this blog – across both image and text – is to demonstrate the value of the form, especially for students, in as much as it offers the following:

• a space in which to collate and more grandly, perhaps, archive a collection of materials that may be more or less diverse;
• a form that enables reflection upon that archive, in making its contents visible;
• a form that allows the artist to think about related forms and practices, and in particular, those that involve modes of appropriation, such as collage, as well as forms such as the artist’s book;

Additionally, because of the way in which many artists have used scrapbooks in the last 100 years or so, the form also supports an interest in hybrid and materially heterogeneous practices.

This blog complements my presentation to the 2018 Association for Art History conference – ‘Cut’n’paste: scrapbooking as method for researching artists’ scrapbooks’, which pioneered a method of visual analysis; the use of visual imagery as the means for reading such.  Links to documents here: https://forarthistory.org.uk/our-work/conference/2019-annual-conference/historiography-in-the-expanded-field/