Workshop: Make a Miniature Concertina Book

Workshop for all ages, children under 12 must be accompanied by an adult.

Materials provided. Bookings essential.

Unlike a traditional book, a concertina book doesn't make you wait. Open it fully and the whole story spills out at once — a continuous landscape of image, texture, and meaning unfolding across every panel. 

In this hands-on workshop, you’ll work with a pre-made miniature concertina to build a collage-book by hand, using layers of cut and torn paper, found ephemera and mixed media. We’ll explore how to use the rhythm of the accordion-fold format to guide a viewer through a simple narrative. Whether your narrative has a story or is purely abstract, using placement, building a visual rhythm and the reveal of each panel in a concertina book is a satisfying way to present a collage story. 

We will show you strategies for working, glues to use, and share our works and what we’ve learned in our experiments.

This workshop includes a talk by Zoë Sadokierski: Anarchival collage: Creating counter narratives from historical images.

Book tickets here.

The talk will run from 2-2.30 and the workshop from 2.45-4. If you've bought a ticket for the workshop there's no need to book for the talk, it will be included in the session.

Your Workshop Leaders

Kathryn Bird is the founder and host of The Social Glue of Sydney. She is also a member of the international collage group @thecollageclub and has exhibited paper collage around the world

Zoë Sadokierski is a designer, educator and researcher. She uses collage in her professional design work, in university tutorials and as a form of active meditation in a hectic world. Concertinas are one of her favourite formats.

Key art above by Zoe Sadokierski

This workshop accompanies the exhibition The Social Glue of Sydney, running at Chrissie Cotter gallery from May 9-24, Thursdays to Sundays, 10 am 4pm. There will be drop in making sessions each open day of the show,f for details and to see all the workshops accompanying the Social Glue of Sydney exhibition, go to our website.

The Social Glue of Sydney thanks the Inner West council for the provision of Chrissie Cotter gallery and the City of Sydney for the ongoing provision of our working space at Alexandria Town Hall for our 4 sessions a month.