For a number of years I have known about the Bookmarks project organised by Sarah Bodman at the University of the West of England. I’ve always wanted to take part and this year I have. The idea is that you make an edition of 100 bookmarks that are then distributed between contributing artists and libraries. You can make 100 bookmarks the same or they can be different. I decided, after much deliberation, that I wanted to do paper cuts, and as I like to doodle faces thought that it would be a good idea to cut 100 different faces into my bookmarks. They would be fragile, but that was okay.

After about 20 faces I began to regret my decision and my ability to think up 80 more, but I persevered and below are scanned images of the results. They are blue in the images below because I put a blue paper behind them to scan them, but they are actually just single sheets of off-white paper with nothing behind.

Not all of the faces are great, but it was a good way to explore drawing one thing, the face, with a scalpel, and some I am really pleased with.

They are pictured here not in exact order, and when they were numbered it was not in the order they were cut in as I took them to my studio, my home studio, my living room, my stands at fairs, my hotel rooms to cut them and they got mixed up. My favourite venue for cutting these was recently in the Great Hall at West Dean College – towards the end of the evening there was just me sitting at a table in this vast room cutting faces.