We Are Making a Bookshop
Royal Academy of Arts Communities Programme x Look Ahead Residents
April - September 2025
We Are Making a Bookshop is the continuation of a two-year collaborative project developed with Look Ahead residents from Felstead House and Flying Angel and Artist Lucie Macgregor bringing together prompts shaped by our shared conversations, personal interests, and small everyday acts.
It began during a visit to the RA Library, when Monica told us she uses books as a drawing diary but has also 'got in trouble for it' which led us to think about the rules around archives, the key chains, plastic pockets, and bits of stationery that enforce them and, in contrast, the freedom of diaries as places for private marks and unregulated creativity.
Our workshops unfolded through listening, receiving, and allowing conversations and making to wander into memories, places, and whatever was around us - participants brought objects and followed their own impulses, and working outdoors shifted the tone as materials fell to the floor and butterflies landed on pages.
The books that emerged carry these gestures and interests - David added a handle, Linda attached a lanyard chain, Sarah pressed a flower, and Daniel used it to record his lists. Together, these elements form a collective creative reflection, a bookshop built from quirks, encounters, and the attentive moments that shaped our time together.
Images above and below from the RA Library 'intervention' in which we returned to the library space, turning it into a reading room and inviting the librarian to 'guess' what interests each book maker holds.
We created a card pack (above) that gathers the book gestures and approaches developed in the workshops, turning each handle, chain, pressed flower, and improvised mark into a portable set of shared references.
As the sessions unfolded, we developed a card pack (above), a playful glossary of making actions, that invited the groups to share their preferred creative gestures, and in keeping with the element of sharing and reflecting that is a throughline throughout the project and in how we creatively put it together. Each card listed simple actions like listing, cutting, layering, or attaching, offering a way to reflect on and explore their approaches together.
A material enquiry underpinned the overall programme (below), exploring key chains, plastic pockets, and other tools of order, unravelling their previous uses and approaching them without hierarchy, allowing them to become playful, creative materials rather than instruments of rules.
