Lily Kong’s residency at London Centre for Book Arts

Over the past couple of years, the Charitable Trust has been able to sponsor a couple of residencies with the London Centre for Book Arts (LCBA). LCBA is an artist-run, open-access studio offering education programmes for the community and affordable access to resources for artists and designers. The latest residency was offered to recent graduate and illustrator Lily Kong. Lily used her time with LCBA to explore what the process of printmaking would contribute to her practice.

In the first half of the residency, Lily focused her time on experimentation, working between collage, relief-printing and riso printing. Focusing on landscapes she worked to mimic the ragged but unexpected edges of paper collages which were already a feature of her work. She was particularly interested in the circulation of the materials she was using and generating, constantly bouncing between making risograph prints, using these prints as the basis for paper collage, then using the collage as a reference for linocut prints, before translating her linocuts back into risograph prints. As she explains, ‘The juxtaposition between wet ink and dry materials helped me understand how materials reflect the context and emotions of a piece of work. It was a slow but meaningful process in exhausting the materials generated in the printmaking process.’

In the second half of her residency Lily drew together what she had learned from her earlier experimentation to make a book called Sweet Escape. The book is a celebration of memory and materiality, and the landscapes she has loved, drawn and photographed. Its vertical format evokes the door we pass through as readers, on the way to visiting these landscapes, which Lily has evoked across a quite stunning sequence of pages. As she writes, ‘Since all of the landscapes were referenced from memories, I thought the grains and the layering inks of risograph prints perfect to mimic the narratives of memories.’ She concluded the project using a drum leaf binding and foil blocking the covers.

It was not the project she had planned, but as she reflects, the residency taught her to, ‘find smaller goals as starting points as it helps finding a common ground for new skills and new work.’ The residency also equipped her with an array of new technical skills and insights into the processes of making a book, not to mention a new network of support. Going forward she hopes to expand on this project and develop a larger body of work further exploring the themes that emerged.

Lily hopes to display her book Sweet Escape at the November lunch, so do look out for it! Having held it in my own hands I can testify to what a treat it will be to see for real. If you would like to know more about Lily’s work, then do please see: instagram.com/lilykongyuet

To conclude, it would only be right to acknowledge with huge thanks the contribution of Simon Goode and Ira Yonemura and the wider community at LCBA for their support of Lily throughout this residency and for everything they have done to further the work of the Wynkyn de Worde Charitable Trust.