“Shortly after moving to London in the mid 1980s I invested in what was for me at the time an enormous amount of money buying a manual badge-making machine, a blue lump of precision machined steel. Since then I’ve continually made my own badge designs and supplemented my income by manufacturing badges for other people, resulting in overdeveloped popeye-style arm muscles from many hours pulling the badge machine handle!
This book is a byproduct of the badge making process, the perforated pages are the waste material left after printed paper discs to be made up into badges have been cut out. Each design on a printed sheet is cut out individually with a circle-cutter and then sandwiched between the metal badge and a thin clear plastic cover.
These pages have been inconsistently stockpiled over several years with no clear plan as to what to do with them, apart from a brief period using them as wallpaper. The book probably began to take form in my always-overflowing waste bin, as I retrieved a stack of multicolour perforated sheets after an afternoon of badge making, the pages were too tacticle and visually interesting to just be thrown away. The overlay of multiple circle grids reminds me of dot screens and moire patterns, foam rubber, Dieter Rot’s early books and those childrens books with windows letting you peep through to future pages. Images are minimal and incidental; notes and quantities in the margins, deleted or misprinted badge art. The differing circle layouts reflect changes in technologies utilised, earlier designs were photocopied, with speed of production being most important—hence random layouts as badge artwork is slapped on the copier glass, resized and multiplied, with a change over to using a computer and Quark’s ‘Step and Repeat’ function, a uniform fixed grid of 35 badge blanks takes over the optimum amount that fit evenly spaced on an A4 sheet.” —Mark Pawson