In this episode of the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast, internationally renowned glass artist Mark Eliott joins Anna Featherstone to show how a published book doesn't need to stay in a fixed format over the years. Mark's Essence of Cloud project began as improvised glass cloud sculptures, grew into a novel and an art exhibition, and now, years later, has taken on a new form as a special-edition e-book with new nonfiction and visual elements. You'll hear about working with artistic collaborators and about flexibility and fluidity in production and distribution decisions.
Listen to the Podcast: Your Book Could Have Multiple Lives
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About the Host
Anna Featherstone is ALLi’s nonfiction adviser and an author advocate and mentor. A judge of The Australian Business Book Awards and Australian Society of Travel Writers awards, she’s also the founder of Bold Authors and presents author marketing and self-publishing workshops for organizations, including Byron Writers Festival. Anna has authored books including how-to and memoirs and her book Look-It’s Your Book! about writing, publishing, marketing, and leveraging nonfiction is on the Australian Society of Authors recommended reading list. When she’s not being bookish, Anna’s into bees, beings, and the big issues of our time.
About the Guest
Mark Eliott, author of Essence of Cloud, is an Australian artist whose glass work is held in private and public collections including the Corning Museum of Glass, the Glasmuseet Ebeltoft in Denmark, the Sculptureum in New Zealand, the National Gallery of Australia, and the Art Gallery of Western Australia, where he won the 2019 Tom Malone Prize. His work ranges from sculptural abstraction and biological representation to mythology and storytelling, often incorporating text, sound, wood, graphics, performance, and scent. Trained first as a jazz saxophonist at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, he went on to earn a Master of Studio Arts and a Master of Visual Arts at Sydney College of the Arts. He teaches glass flame-work in his studio at Among the Trees, Marrickville, and lives with his partner Manjit in Sydney. You can find Mark on his website and Instagram.
Read the Transcript
Anna Featherstone: Welcome, and thanks for tuning in from your special part of this beautiful planet. I'm Anna Featherstone, joining you today from the lands of the Palawa people, the original storytellers of this place in lutruwita, Tasmania. Today we're going to look at the idea that a book doesn't have to stay fixed the moment it's published.
We'll also see how a book may even start as something else entirely, grow over time, get added to, and be repackaged years later into something richer. If you have a book out there already, this episode might get you thinking about what you'd revisit if you had the chance, and how you'd go about producing and distributing that new version. And if you're still in the process of writing, hopefully it'll give you plenty of ideas and inspiration for how you might approach your project.
Our guest today, Mark Eliott, is a case in point. Mark is an internationally renowned glass artist, known for his flame-worked glass, his sculptural work, and his gift for storytelling through objects. His exhibition, Essence of Cloud, brought together glass, carved wood, watercolor, performance, scent, plenty more, and a paperback novel that spans five centuries and eight countries. The book's characters are in pursuit of a rare and almost undetectable substance called cloud essence, and now, years on, that novel has begun a second life as a special edition e-book.
Welcome, Mark.
Mark Eliott: Hi, Anna. How are you?
Anna Featherstone: Good. I see you in your glass artist overalls there. Are they your permanent outfit?
Mark Eliott: Yes, they've grown onto me. They've become fixed, pretty much.
Anna Featherstone: And did you write your book in them?
Mark Eliott: A lot of it, yes. In slightly different colors as well. Red overalls, blue overalls.
The Story Grows Out of the Clouds
Anna Featherstone: So I want to talk about where the book began. Your paperback novel has been described as magical realism, fantasy, environmental hopepunk, with elements of family history and more. And now, with the new e-book version, it also offers nonfiction in the form of a history of glassblowing through the ages, tips for sculpting and blowing borosilicate glass, and some wonderful images from the exhibition of which the novel is also a part. So can you tell us how this ever-evolving project began, and how many years it's taken to get to this stage?
Mark Eliott: Well, it started when I was blowing glass clouds in the pre-COVID era. It was an experimental project. I've long been interested in improvisation, and there's a thing called pareidolia, where you see patterns in chaos, in random phenomena. That's part of the improvisational aspect of art, I think: the human mind's capacity for making patterns out of random phenomena. Clouds are one of the classic things that induce pareidolia in people, and so I'm fascinated by the way we read things into clouds. We see animals and so on.
My story started really in that improvisational mode of blowing glass clouds. Pre-COVID, it was just about a page of ideas that developed alongside the blowing of the clouds. So I was sort of writing with one hand and glassblowing with the other, so to speak. Not literally, but that's what it felt like.
Anna Featherstone: That could be dangerous.
Mark Eliott: Yeah, it could indeed. And during COVID it went out of control, because I had nothing else to do for a while. I was stuck at home, and I'm ashamed to say I'm one of those people who had a really good time during much of the COVID era. While other people were suffering, working in hospitals flat out and that kind of thing, I was at home writing. It started turning into a novel, and I couldn't stop it. It just kept on growing like this ever-expanding cloud. I ended up having to hire an editor to help me rein it in, Helen Williams in Melbourne, and she was really wonderful. She helped steer the project into a manageable form, which is still a very large novel. That was a very satisfying process. And along the way, I collaborated with lots of other artists. I could mention some of those artists if you like.
Anna Featherstone: We can include them in a link in the show notes.
Collaborators Change the Story
Mark Eliott: Sure. The collaborative process was wonderful because it brought new elements into the work. People would come up with ideas in the process.
Anna Featherstone: So is that for the exhibition or for the novel?
Mark Eliott: Both, really, because sometimes the novel would be influenced by the objects.
Anna Featherstone: Give us an example.
Mark Eliott: Shane Wiegitznek was one of the artists who collaborated with me, and he made a wonderful chest in the style of a 19th-century apothecary chest. I'd sent him sketches, but he reinterpreted them, and in the making of that chest he added a bell to the side. Now, that bell wasn't in the story, so I then had to write it into the story. Another example would be the scentsmith, Ainslie Walker, who was also one of the collaborators and assisted me with a lot of the work around the scent. She suggested that some of the other locations in the book might have had scent arising from them, and so that also influenced the story in a small way, as well as the artwork.
Anna Featherstone: So that changed what you were writing, and it's ended up as this amazing piece of art. You have all the perfume bottles, or the essence bottles, within this cabinet, and each has a different perfume.
Mark Eliott: Yes, that's right. And that expanded from a couple of scents that I originally had in mind to a larger collection of scents. That really developed through discussion.
Anna Featherstone: And those bottles all have a special artistic label on them.
Mark Eliott: Yep, that's right. I drew up labels in the style of the 19th century. I think some of the works are a bit like theater props. My father was an actor, and my early memories as a child included going to the theater, going backstage at the end of a show, and seeing the props that had been used during the play, and being astounded, really, that one could use very simple materials to evoke aspects of the story. I think that's part of where my storytelling with objects comes from.
The Exhibition Launches Before the Book
Anna Featherstone: So what kind of pressure were you under to finish the novel so it was ready for the art exhibition? Or was there more pressure on getting the physical pieces completed? I don't even know how you timed that to match up.
Mark Eliott: Well, look, I couldn't really time it to match up. Each had to take its own path, because the objects were discrete pieces. Components of the show were easier to finish, in a way, whereas the book was such a large, expanding story that it really took time, for the editing process in particular. So the first iteration of the exhibition wasn't accompanied by the book; it was accompanied by the promise of the book. The first one, the launch of the exhibition, was in Canberra, and then the launch of the book accompanying the exhibition was at the next iteration, in Sydney.
Anna Featherstone: Oh, that's so interesting. So you had to have an openness to that, and not get stressed, and accept that it's part of the evolution of the exhibition. It's really interesting to manage that.
And for listeners out there, Mark is under the Sydney flight path, so every now and then you might hear a plane going overhead, but it's still quieter than recording from his studio, which also has a timber workshop down below and artists coming and going.
Impatience Drives a Print Run
Anna Featherstone: So in 2023, you printed the book with an offset press, a traditional printer. You didn't use print-on-demand, so you got a bulk load of printed copies at once, and you didn't do print-on-demand or an e-book at that time. What was behind that decision? Or did you not know about those things at the time?
Mark Eliott: Look, I took that decision because, for a start, I just wanted to get it out there quickly. I was quite impatient, and I didn't want to wait around. I certainly didn't want to wait around to find a publisher. I wanted to be able to discuss it and have it accompany the exhibition in its future iterations. And so the simplest way just seemed to be to do a print run. And I like the idea of a physical object.
Anna Featherstone: Yeah, and also because so much of the exhibition is physical, having another physical piece as part of the exhibition would have mattered. And I think many writers understand that feeling of impatience. So don't worry, you're not alone there.
So the paperback wasn't made available online or through print-on-demand at the time. How did you go about getting it into readers' hands?
Mark Eliott: Really, it's been a slow, organic process. I do a lot of teaching in my studio, and so quite a lot of the books have gone out to students. When they come to the studio, I have some of the artwork on display, and I have the books available, and so they tend to trickle out like that, as well as, of course, to friends and family. So I haven't yet approached it really as a commercial project.
The E-Book Brings the Artwork In
Anna Featherstone: And now, though, you have turned it into an e-book, but you've really changed things up, because the original paperback version only included a couple of images, whereas with the e-book you're now including full-color images of all the artwork, and you've placed them near text that's relevant in the novel. You've also added a huge amount of accessibility text and descriptions of the pieces to meet accessibility laws around the world, where you need to provide alternative text for images for people with low vision or accessibility needs. Is it hard or easy for you to describe in text what you and your collaborators have created?
Mark Eliott: It is hard, because you could write a whole book on the making of the exhibition. I could go into pages on each work describing all the people who've been involved. My daughter, Simmy Eliott, for example, who's a wonderful glass artist, was instrumental with some of the works, especially with her beautiful botanical glasswork. To get into the intricacies of each piece would be quite difficult, so I had to trim it down to the minimum.
Collaborators Leave Their Fingerprints
Anna Featherstone: I thought it was fascinating being able to see what the actual materials were and the dimensions of the pieces. Because in a book or an e-book, it's a flat image on a page, but understanding the size of them is fascinating. I was lucky enough to see the pieces in real life, and it just blew my mind. It's like a whole other world, and just so amazing.
In each image you give credit to all the artists involved. What was it like collaborating with so many artists? As writers we do this too; we might collaborate with different people. But how did you manage their creativity, because they have their own innate creativity, while being strong on your creative vision?
Mark Eliott: Perhaps I've been lucky. I found all the experiences to be really wonderful, and they really spanned the full range, starting from the sort of collaborative input that is typically called fabricating work. Quite often the creative aspect of people's contribution to a work gets pretty much erased, and it's all about the original author, the genius artist. But there are often people behind the scenes contributing to a work whose creative fingerprint is there if you look for it, and I try to acknowledge that. So there's the full range, from people who just made small components, little glass sprouts that went into one of the works, for example, that had to be almost mass-produced by hand…
Anna Featherstone: Did you say glass sprouts?
Mark Eliott: Yes.
Anna Featherstone: Like little pieces of greenery?
Mark Eliott: Yes, that's right. Mustard cress sprouts, to be specific, in one of the works, which is a cloud essence condenser, a piece of scientific apparatus. So I've had people contributing on a very minor level, all the way to Jeff Hamilton, for example, who literally made one of the artworks with only a very thin brief and a rough sketch from me, and then created a whole beautiful stained glass window. It was done in discussion, but it's very much more his work than my work. So it's spanned that full gamut, from fabrication to collaboration weighted more on the artist's side than on mine, and everything in between. And some of the works haven't been collaborative at all. They've been all my own work.
The Mothership Takes the Cover
Anna Featherstone: It's amazing that you've been able to include all the images in the e-book, which adds so much to the book. And you've also changed the cover. The original paperback has a stunning illustration of Mr. Cloudy Head with a beautiful blue background and clouds, whereas the e-book special edition has a striking photo of an actual glass art piece called The Mothership. I think it's a wonderful choice to bring in those new elements in the book, the nonfiction elements, the reality of the glass art tips and the history of glass art and the other things you've added as bonus material in the e-book. Can you describe The Mothership for us?
Mark Eliott: The Mothership is often mistaken for Noah's Ark, but it's not a curated selection of animals in a ship. It's warts and all; everything's in there. It's a beautiful cast glass boat with a mountain inside it. It's a large, chunky boat, made by Spike Dean to my design in Canberra, and she specializes in cast glass. Around that is a cornucopia of life inside the boat. You've got a tree, the tree of the seven clouds, which features in the story, with a just-detectable cloud goddess face in one of the clouds. Then you've got all sorts of animals. You've got narwhals with dragonflies on their horns. You've got all sorts of plants, made by Simmy mostly, and you've got tigers and marsupials and weedy sea dragons and a nun with a strange object for collecting cloud essence, and you've got a guy with a gun about to possibly shoot a giraffe, and you've got coronaviruses and all sorts of things. A lady with a trumpet.
Anna Featherstone: It's a beautiful, incredible piece, and I think it's a great choice for the cover because it may attract people not just interested in the story, but also art lovers, global collectors of art, and people interested in glassblowing. It's a beautiful crossover piece that sums up the story within, but also brings the art front and center on the cover.
So what I want to know about that particular piece is this: when we produce books, we know that more can be printed, but what emotions do you go through when someone wants to buy such a one-and-only special piece of art?
Mark Eliott: Well, it's tricky, because on the one hand you want to be able to make a gift of an artwork. I always see it as a process of giving, whether there's money involved or not. It's a gift of an artwork and a gift of money in exchange. But money seems like a fairly shallow, transparent substance that doesn't really represent anything. It's hard to describe, really. It's obviously a necessary and useful medium of transaction, but it doesn't really convey the sharing of stories that goes on when we give and receive artworks. And I definitely have found it difficult to sell some parts of the show, because then I'm left with a hole in the show, and I've got to come up with another work that is not the same, but that fills that gap in a way.
Draft2Digital Carries the Exhibition Around the World
Anna Featherstone: It's so interesting that the e-book actually is like a gift too, because now the exhibition's in a new format that can be spread and gifted around the world quite easily. So it's being distributed. You've chosen Draft2Digital, which helps get it onto lots of platforms, and it's non-exclusive on Amazon. How will you let people know about it, like the people who come to your art classes and exhibitions? Would you have a QR code so people can find it easily?
Mark Eliott: Yes, I am going to have a QR code, and so whenever I'm having exhibitions, I'll use that. I've got a big exhibition coming up in Wagga Wagga, in New South Wales, at the National Glass Collection in April 2027, and that'll be a great opportunity to have maybe a few physical books as well, but predominantly the e-book.
Anna Featherstone: And your glass art's available in museums around the world as well. So it's great that you've gone beyond the paperback, which had no distribution, to be able to share that more widely. But down the track, might you think of doing a special edition hardcover with all those images and all the extended material? Or is that a step too far, because you'd have to re-photograph everything?
Mark Eliott: I think that's quite possible. Some of the works could definitely do with better photography. For the best of the photographs I've gone to Richard Weinstein in Sydney, and he's done some beautiful photography. And for the original paperback, Dion Cozic put the cover together, as well as the new cover, and added illustrations to the work. Really, he's one of the major collaborators in the project. I could definitely see him having a role in doing a hardback version, and probably also Campbell Ben Roy, who assisted with putting together the first book. His assistance was wonderful. So I could really imagine putting together a next iteration, especially, as you say, with really good-quality images dispersed through the book.
An Artist Learns When to Stop
Anna Featherstone: It's wonderful that you're working with so many other creatives. But I am wondering: you've got those exhibitions coming up, but like a novelist adding more to a series, how will you know when it's time to stop adding to the Essence of Cloud project? Or is it never-ending?
Mark Eliott: I can't answer that question. That's probably one of the difficulties I have as an artist. It's one of the classic difficulties, knowing when to stop, and it's always a bit of a learning curve. In this case, there are so many artworks involved, and there are so many potential artworks. It's quite a visual story. I'm thinking a bit filmically when I'm writing, so there's a lot of imagery that could be converted into artworks or expressed as visual artworks. I could easily spend the rest of my life just making more and more artworks illustrating the story. But I've got lots of other projects on the boil as well.
The messiness of art-making sometimes involves putting things down for a while and coming back to them. I don't really see a life as a sequential journey, in a way. It's a bit of a continuum. It's a bit more circular, so you can find yourself revisiting things that you did earlier in your career and reworking them, especially with the type of glass I use, which is really suited to that process of reworking.
Untemplate Yourself
Anna Featherstone: So as a creative, what tips or insights do you have for other authors about encouraging their own creativity, or listening to themselves when they produce their art? What's something you can share with the authors out there listening?
Mark Eliott: Well, one thought I've been having is that we're increasingly in a world that's governed by templates. We could almost, in some ways, call this the template society. And I think particularly in the online world, we've come to a condition of often ticking boxes. It's a bit like when you're a kid and you get coloring books, and most of the creativity's already been done for you. The framework's there, and you just color it in. It's very easy in art-making to go down that track, and I would encourage people to just invent and create from scratch as much as possible.
A lot of my work, for example, is very planned, but I also like to return to freeform abstract work, starting without a plan, jumping in without overthinking it, and just playing, being playful and experimenting. I think it's a great thing to return to, even if it's the polar opposite of much of your work. In my case, for quite a lot of my work I'll do preparatory sketches, and I measure things and premix colors and so on. But writing, for me, is a bit of a stream-of-consciousness thing, in that I find it very hard to come from the perspective of starting out with a genre and a demographic. I don't sit down to write a hero's journey book or a crime fiction novel or to address a particular age group. I can't really work like that. A story starts evolving in my head and grows out of, who knows, out of the clouds.
Anna Featherstone: Out of the clouds.
Mark Eliott: Influenced by everything that's come before me, and it starts to materialize, and you just go with the flow of that. That's the way I work. I'm not saying it's the best way. It's just the way my creativity tends to operate. I sometimes think of my brain as a bit like a compost heap, and seeds from various things end up in there and sprout. I can't say I'm entirely in control of that process. Some of those things grow on to be more elaborate plants, and some don't.
I feel like I need to retain a little bit of naivety in the way that I work. If you're too concerned with, for example, what your audience is going to think, then I think you can easily lose the sense of wonder and excitement of discovering something that you're not entirely in control of, something that can surprise you as an artist or as an author. Ideas like that will grow, and you often don't even recognize them. It's like a child, and you're wondering where it's come from. It's come from you in a sense, but it's also come from the world around you. We're part of the world. We're not separate from the world.
So I think being a bit freeform, a little bit loose, is a really good thing. And not being too concerned about, for example, trying to be completely original. I think that could be a bit of a trap. One could spend a lot of time honing one's artistic identity and trying to be completely original and do things that nobody else has done, but I think it's the sense of discovery that's important. It doesn't really matter whether you're rediscovering something that's been discovered a million times or whether it really is something that no one else has discovered. It's the sense of discovery that you are experiencing that matters, and that will convey itself through your writing, or your reading too, if there's a sense of discovery involved in the creative process. Maybe that's a bit contagious. Obviously, you don't want to plagiarize; you don't want to copy other people's work. But I think being too concerned about it limits one's creativity.
Anna Featherstone: I love that.
Mark Eliott: Everything you've done comes from somewhere.
Find Mark Online
Anna Featherstone: Exactly. I love the advice to untemplate ourselves. I think that's a really great way of looking at it. Oh my goodness, there is so much we could talk about, and I love that people now can discover your work. It's a visual feast and a reading feast. So thank you so much for joining us today. Where can people find you and your work?
Mark Eliott: My website is the most obvious place: markeliottglass.com, with a very tricky spelling, one L and two Ts in Eliott. Very artistic, but I can't claim credit for that.
Anna Featherstone: We'll include that in the show notes, markeliottglass.com, with one L in Eliott.
Mark Eliott: That's right. And two Ts. One L and two Ts. There's a lot of artwork there. There's a teaching page that links through to all the classes that I'm running, with wonderful teachers, in my studio at the moment.
Anna Featherstone: Fabulous. Well, thank you so much for bringing the artwork to the world, and also putting it into novel form, and now the extended version. I think other authors out there might see in it a new way to repackage their work. Fiction doesn't necessarily have to stay fiction if you have other things that actually add to the work. I just think that's fascinating. So thank you so much for joining us, Mark.
Mark Eliott: Thank you very much, Anna.
Anna Featherstone: And to all of you out there listening, if this has got you thinking about a book you've already published and what it could still become, that's exactly the seed I hoped this episode would plant. So whatever you're writing about, whatever you're creating, thank you for being part of our very special ALLi Podcast family. I'm Anna Featherstone, and here's to you and your creative energy firing up this week. Catch you next time.
