My second Ampersand Duck EASS Broadside Residency recipient is Peter McLean. He won the residency in December 2009, and for various reasons known to all emerging artists, he’s only got around to it 18 months later. I don’t mind, it’s always worth the wait.Peter is a graduate of the ANU Printmedia and Drawing Workshop and his special subject was wood engraving, mixed up with bone prints and stump rubbings. He’s an outdoorsy sort of dude, likes to pick up odd bits of wood and bits of fungi on his bush meanderings and prints from them. He keeps a blog (called Art Out and About) that can tell you a lot more about his work, and which hopefully will get used a lot while he is overseas doing a residency in California in Aug/Sept/Oct 2011.

When we started talking about his residency, he had no idea about what text to use, and he’s not much of a poetry reader. I’d just come back from New Zealand loaded with new poetry books and experiences of meeting poets in the wild. I’d been introduced to a poet called Brian Turner who wasn’t part of my posse of Otakou poets, but who had impressed me with his love of the landscape and his intolerance of fools. I was introduced to him before I’d seen an excellent poem of his in the local paper, and before I’d bought his latest volume of poems, Just This, so I didn’t get a chance to admire his work to his face. Soon after I bought his book, it won the NZ Book of the Year poetry section for 2010.

So I threw Brian’s book and David Campbell’s Collected (DC was a fine Australian poet who wrote primarily of the local Canberra/Monaro region) at Pete and sent him away. Brian won, and so we had a text, his poem ‘Sky’. It was delight to write to Brian asking him permission to reproduce the poem and to tell him what I thought of him, and even more of a delight that he readily gave us permission.

Time slipped by, but I knew the project was brewing, and Pete and I saw each other regularly at his workplace, Megalo, and at various openings, so there was always a chance to discuss progress. Finally we found a time to work together, mostly impelled by his impending residency deadline.

Pete had the idea of combining a manufactured wood engraving block (made of small blocks of boxwood joined together to make a larger block) with print from a found piece of wood. The poem ponders over what the sky would do if it could observe what we humans get up to down here, and so there are two levels of image: the natural sky and the human-meddled earth.

In Pete’s composition, the ‘sky’ is actually the manufactured block, and the ‘ground’ is the natural print. We have used a combination of Baskerville and Imprint Outline for the text, and the paper is Iwaki washi, which is a lovely light and yellowy paper that makes black ink look stunning.

The broadside is now editioned and ready to sell — it is a limited edition of no more than 50, so if you would like a copy, get in touch quickly, as I think it will sell fast. The details and price are listed at the foot of this post.

But first, some images:

This is the piece of log that Pete has painstakingly cut & mounted, ready to be hand-printed. It was too big to fit on the press! He worked out a process of folding the foot of the sheets to mask off bits of the log, which we then cut off before printing the rest on the press.

Here he is, in Studio Duck, folding a test piece before hand-printing it. You can’t tell, but it was very cold in the studio that day.

Here are the offcuts. We are going to take half each, and see what we each come up with.

This is the wood engraving block, exquisitely engraved, but not inked. While I set up the press and type and pulled some proofs, Pete prepared paper and continued hand-printing his log.

The text and the block, locked up in a chase on the press, ready to roll (see, I can use a cliche here and it actually MEANS something).

Oops! The block was too high here, there are bits showing that are unwelcome. We have packed little slips of paper under parts of the block, but there are obviously too many. It’s amazing the difference a small piece of bond paper makes.

We adjusted the packing, and the block printed perfectly. We used Neil Wallace Wood Engraving Ink, it’s lovely and stiff on the press. We had to touch up the type slightly with a hand roller at each pass, but that is so much easier, quicker and more accurate than faffing with the block each time.

Woo hoo! The print up on the pinboard at bon a tire stage (ready to print). We are jubilant. Pete stayed up late that night finishing the log prints at Megalo.

A couple of days later, the log prints are almost dry (such oily ink takes a long time to dry in Winter, so these are touch dry, but if you rub them, they smear) and we can edition what is on the press.

The more good ones we print, the happier we are.

Once we’d printed what we thought was enough (we’re not sure how many will make it to the final edition, but we managed about 60 all up), Pete pulled an edition of just the cloud, for his exhibition.

So. Here are the broadside details:

Peter McLean, Sky, 2011.
Poetry by Brian Turner, from Just This (NZ: Victoria University Press, 2009)
Wood engraving, letterpress and direct print from found wood on Iwaki washi (paper).
c. 505 x 234mm
Edition of c. 50
$100 each plus postage & handling

These broadsides will be available at the Duckshop from late July, but if you would like to pre-order, please email ampersandduck {at} gmail {dot} com.

(There are still copies of Natalie Azzopardi’s Game Over series available to buy as well!)