Two years ago I setup a screenprinting studio in my apartment here in Bristol in the UK. I had recently been to a printed ephemera sale and had been introduced to the idea of a make-ready, where printers use the same sheets when setting up different jobs. This creates a haphazard layering, a record of recent jobs. I liked the idea as I had inadvertently done if myself while screenprinting in the studios at my university.

I thought it would be cool to try and make one make-ready last a whole academic year. Keeping track of one piece of paper would be hard, especially in the chaos of a studio. So I began to use a notebook as a make-ready, knowing it’d be easier to keep track of. That was the start of a project that would end in the process being documented by Creative Review in their monthly subscriber’s only publication Monograph.

It was a project that had no meaning, required almost no thought, had to composition or consideration. But that project opened a few doors the might have otherwise been closed to me, so I always look back on it fondly. I can’t send out copies of Monograph to everyone, so here’s the project condensed into a couple seconds of animated gif.