Craft ACT in Canberra has two galleries and another, smaller space that they call the Crucible Space: essentially just two shelves set into a wall in the foyer outside the gallery. Miniaturist and collector Anna-Maria Sviatko, while doing an internship at Craft ACT, hit upon the notion of turning the two shelves into a two-tiered miniature craft gallery at 1:12 scale. The result was Call of the Small, an exhibition of (to quote my personal blog) teeny-tiny craft works, made very seriously by serious craftspeople.I was one of the Called, and I designed and printed some very little letterpress broadsides. I didn’t have a lot of time to work on them, as I was preparing to travel to NZ to make some much bigger broadsides. Funnily enough, printing small is just as tricky, maybe even more so, than printing big. So the edition sizes for each poster varies. And there’s one series of images, and then a few fun ones that just begged to be made.

If you’d like to see the process of putting the exhibition together, and all the wonderful studio visits made by Anna-Maria to the craftspeople involved, here’s a link to all of her posts on the subject.

THE SERIES

These letters do not spell anything out deliberately; they were chosen to go with the images, which are little metal ornaments that I bought from eBay years ago. Feel free to make them spell things; Anna-Maria made them spell R&D in the show, others may want the word FORD, or maybe your name is DROF. Heh. The letters are 72pt Gill Sans, printed in a bright sexy red. All have little hand-filed deckles at the head and tail, and are numbered and signed.

Each of these is 45 x 32 mm in dimension, so you’re probably looking at them at a larger scale (which won’t do them any favours).

They’re not really meant to be lined up together, so I didn’t put a lot of effort into making the height of AMPERSAND DUCK match up. I designed each one as an individual, taking into account the balance of each image on the ‘page’.

Edition numbers are:

D: Dragonfly — 20

O: Owl — 20

R: Rat — 20

&: Ampersand — 10

F: Frog: 20

They are all still available.

THE OTHERS

Speaks for itself.

45 x 32mm, in an edition of 9. Still available.

Hammer Time. Hand-coloured.

55 x 32mm. Edition of 6. Still available.

Almost Ace. I just love this one. In amongst a box of miscellaneous letterpress stuff was this tiny little logo with the letters ACF, and I’ve looked at it for years wondering if anything could be done with it or should I just chuck it. One day… BING! I saw the way forward.

Printed on red Japanese washi, 42 x 30mm. Edition of 11. Still available.

All of these broadsides are Aus$10 each plus p&h.