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Crafts CouncilStories

Why Faith Shannon rocked the realm of bookbinding


ByTanya Harrod

13 April 2023

Tanya Harrod discusses the bookbinder's lithic loves, now the subject of an exhibition at the Crafts Council Gallery


Tanya Harrod

13 April 2023

  • Crafts magazine
  • Crafts Council exhibition
  • Crafts Council Gallery
  • Bookbinding
  • Exhibitions

  • The bookbinder Faith Shannon in her studio in 2009. Photo: Shannon Tofts

The bookbinder, graphic artist and watercolourist Faith Shannon spent her last 28 years on the west coast of Scotland. Her very address, ‘Corranbeg Workshops, Ardfern by Lochgilphead’, seemed full of romance to me, bringing to mind a landscape of grassy hills rich in prehistoric remains looking over Loch Craignish and a host of smaller sea lochs and islands, with Mull and Scarba beyond.

Shannon (who died in August 2018) sailed these intricate coasts with her second husband, the furniture maker Sandy Mackilligin, and walked, drew and painted on the hills above. From childhood, she had been a dedicated amateur geologist, sharing this lithic love with her father. ‘I love stones and always have done,’ she stated in a long and revealing interview for the British Library’s Crafts Lives collection. The landscape of Argyll, formed by the Caledonian earth’s movements some 470 million years ago and later scoured by glaciers, became central to her work.


Headstone, from the series Stone by Faith Shannon. Photo: Shannon Tofts

Today, we are witnessing a full-blown geological turn in the art world, given intellectual heft by the philosopher Jane Bennett’s identification of ‘vibrant materialism’ – shorthand for respect for the inanimate world. Meanwhile, Hettie Judah’s recent Lapidarium: The Secret Life of Stones (John Murray Press) takes the form of a perfectly timed and absorbing story book.

If all this makes the redisplay of Shannon’s bindings at the Crafts Council Gallery in London (Stone: Ten Bindings) highly appropriate, arguably Shannon’s extraordinary recreation of unworked and worked stones goes much deeper than any passing petromania. After all, the present geological turn has distinctly commercial ambitions. At Frieze Masters 2023, the gallery Art Ancient showed an array of extra-terrestrial rocks – meteorites. With prices ranging from £2,000 to £1 million, owning expensive rocks dating ‘from the formation of the solar system’ might seem like an insurance against an uncertain future.

The 10 bindings of Stone stand as Shannon’s tribute to the earth’s longevity, in which she acknowledged human insignificance in the face of geological time

In 2005, Shannon wrote to me of the death of the great calligrapher Joan Rix Tebbutt. Almost in passing, she ended her letter: ‘I am coming to the end of a long haul with a collection of 10 bindings of George Mackay Brown’s poems, illustrated with Gunnie Moberg’s photographs beautifully printed by Mardersteig of Verona for [patrons] Colin Hamilton and Kulgin Duval. Each binding different from the other and hopefully to be exhibited in 2006 – but who knows!! Just to let you know I have not retired!’

Her 10 bindings of Mackay Brown’s Stone were indeed exhibited that year at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh (and it is this series that was featured in the Crafts Council show). They remain one of the most ambitious sequences of bindings and accompanying boxes made in the 20th century, each box and binding an investigative recreation of stones as varied as basalt, quartz in greywacke, slate and phyllite.

While Shannon was working on the Stone bindings, there was a renewed interest in the Victorian polymath John Ruskin, whose powerful writings analysed geological structures in Turner’s paintings, and who had collected countless mineral specimens. During the 1980s, the term ‘scholar’s rocks’ was coined by the western art market to account for what historian Craig Clunas carefully described as ‘small unworked pieces of valued mineral, accessible to the eye and the hand and the ear’. Placed on carved wooden stands, these rocks were valued by the educated Chinese of the 17th century and earlier.


  • A glimpse of Shannon’s collection of local rocks and shells in her studio. Photo: Shannon Tofts

  • A detail of Mossy Phyllite, from the series Stone by Faith Shannon. Photo: Shannon Tofts

Far Eastern quietist ideas about art works that are ‘recognised’ rather than made, and John Ruskin’s belief that minerals teach ‘The Truths of the Earth’ will surely outface the vagaries of fashion. For Shannon, whose studio was filled with specimens picked up in the surrounding landscape of Ardfern and who read deeply on geology, rocks were both alive and immemorial.

Stone offered her ‘a sense of enduring’. She had her own respect for the inanimate, closer to the marble quarry men of Tuscany who, interviewed by the oral historian Giovanni Contini, explained that everything in nature has a soul, that marble was alive and could feel pain.


A detail of Mossy Phyllite, from the series Stone by Faith Shannon. Photo: Shannon Tofts

The 10 bindings of Stone stand as Shannon’s tribute to the earth’s longevity, in which she acknowledged human insignificance in the face of geological time. For her, the intricate layering of materials used in these extraordinary bindings and boxes – from vellum to pressed paper to Morocco leathers to acrylic paint – mirrored the layering and lamination of rock under pressure, disrupted by volcanic lava intrusions, worn by ice and by water. And if Stone reflected on geological time, the project also offered a challenge to industrial and post-industrial time. The bindings took her over 16 years to complete.

In her lifetime, Shannon was mostly celebrated within the rarefied world of fine bindings, peopled by remarkable patrons like Colin Hamilton and Kulgin Duval, who commissioned her Stone project. Will the art world discover Faith Shannon, as they have discovered contemporary textiles and ceramics, previously dismissed as ‘craft’? Their reinscribing into the networks of art has been both a valuing and devaluing process, in which histories of discrete craft disciplines risk being lost. Be careful what you wish for.

‘Stone: Ten Bindings’ is at the Crafts Council Gallery, 15 March – 15 April; craftscouncil.org.uk

This first appeared in Crafts magazine – read more

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