Handmade Books

Handmade Books Selection by Leah Crossley | A.i.R

Leah Crossley presents a series of images spotlighting her handmade books selection in this piece for her time at Wales Arts Review as part of the Artists in Residence series. Throughout 2017 artists, including Leah Crossley will take a leading creative role in what Wales Arts Review publishes, centring their skills on a challenging project over the course of a month. We were inundated with applications, receiving hundreds of emails about the positions, and it was no easy task whittling down all that talent to this final eleven. Our team of six editors debated long into the night, and in the end, we decided on a collection of people who we most want to work with, and whose work excites us. We think you will be excited by them too.

Crossley is a photographic-artist, with no formal training in photography. Her projects emanate from a personal approach to camera art, digital image-making and collage that has been evolving since 2010. She employs an experimental approach to photographic processes; layering is an integral component to my visual interpretations and interventions, eg. through collage, multiple-exposures, blurring, transposing, embedding text and image into pre-existing publications.

Her residency with Wales Arts Review will provide time and space through which to disclose personal artistic developments in relation to herself as an artist, via deeper exploration into the journaling process and its value as an artistic tool of discovery and expression. It will also contribute to the development of a self-directed Artist Residency in Motherhood as a vehicle for extending and developing her focus, and to establish a framework within which she can explore ways of working as a new Mother and creating work about Motherhood. 


Continuing Wales Arts Review’s highlighting of Welsh talent in our Artist in Residence project, here Leah Crossley presents a selection of images of her handmade books and handmade books ideas, inspired in part by this Pinterest account.

Leah has employed an experimental approach to photographic processes; in which layering is an integral component of her visual interpretations and interventions. In which:

“performance has been an important catalyst through which I have explored my creative practice. I have created images and projects that migrate between live performance, documentary and visual practice. These enquiries have allowed me to collaborate with a wide range of artists, performers and companies.  I am proud to be associated with the performative map in Wales, and have been fortunate to work and collaborate with some of Wales’ most exciting and innovative performers, performance-makers and theatre producers.”

Handmade Books Selection

Handmade Books Selection

Handmade Books Selection

Leah Crossley

Leah Crossley


This contribution by Leah Crossley is part of the Artists in Residence series.