Julian Davies, artist and writer, is the proprietor, and he’s had a couple of exhibitions since opening the gallery. The next exhibition is a group one in which I am a participant. It’s called String Books, and is inspired by printmaker Franki Sparke’s tales of South American (I think specifically Brazilian) books that are small and light and hung on washing-line-like strings.

I love these themed exhibitions, because it makes me think outside my box, so to speak. Like with Call of the Small, or The Hankie Project.

In this case, I’d just finished printing my second Book Art Object piece, in cyan, magenta and yellow, and had a whole pile of offset paper in all three colours. Cyan is such a marvellous sky blue, and the idea of a hanging book made me want to think about why it would be hanging from above.

I don’t know about you, but if something awful or embarrassing happens to me, I don’t want the ground to open and swallow me up — imagine the weight of all that earth. No, I’d rather something or someone plucked me upwards and allowed me to float in the clouds for a while, above all the problems, until they went away.

And that’s why this book was made. It’s called Skyhooks.

The orange line you can see is my makeshift hanging line from when I tested the look of it hanging.

I had enough of the offset paper to make two of these, so it’s an ‘edition’ of two, but they’re quite individual.

Catch them at The Left Hand, for three weekends through December 2010.

Learning Absence, 2010. Artist’s book of letterpress and monoprints on Kozo washi. Text is the poem Learning Absence, 1986 by Rosemary Dobson. Handprinted and bound in a hardcover Asian stab binding with either handmade denim rag endpapers (made by Katharine Nix) or blue commercial momigami endpapers. Edition of 15, made for the Book Art Object project. The poem is reproduced with permission from the poet and is taken from her Collected Poems (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1991).

Dobson’s poem has a special meaning to me, as I have known her for a long time now. I wanted to make a book that could draw from my experience with her, but also be more generally appealing, in the same way that Dobson’s poem itself is personal yet taps into broader emotions.

I decided to use monoprinting to make images for my book. I think that loneliness and grief – the two dominant emotions I get from the poem – are universal human experiences, but that no two experiences can be the same, so monoprinting suits as an visual metaphor. I added text using handset and printed letterpress, and kept the entire book in one colour range: a deep blue-black mix that varied as I printed, in an attempt to create a melancholy early-evening lonely feeling to match the sensation of arriving home to an empty house. I tried to make the visual movement of the imagery move from external to internal and then out to universal.

The binding had to be formal (a hardcover stab stitch) with a personal touch (a hand-stitching in vintage thread across the front). I printed enough copies to be able to give one to Dobson’s family, and they responded well to the way I’d presented the poem, understanding the connection I’d made to the poet herself, which is very gratifying.

Book Art Object is a loose grouping of book artists that shifts with each project. The central concept is that of a book club for book artists, so we pick a text that we all like and then respond to it and discuss the results. I am treating my BAO participation as a way of experimenting with processes and forms that I would like to try, so I don’t think of each piece as something to be eventually exhibited (even though it probably will be!).

Working with other artists on this project has been wonderful for both the feeling of support and also the chance to discuss approaches to the text, which is so enriching to the development of our ideas and working methods. We communicate through our Book Art Object blog, sharing ideas and progress, and it’s wonderful to witness at the end how differently we all respond to the same text.

Those Who Travel is a very special collaboration by four artists: Sarah Rice, Patsy Payne, Ampersand Duck and Shellaine Godbold.

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this is a gap

A stunning artists’ book of original, unpublished poems by Sarah Rice, accompanied by a suite of exquisite images by Patsy Payne, produced using lithography and pounced graphite drawings. The layout has been designed to create a spacious, airy feel, and the binding has been kept light and fluid to reflect the dream-like quality of the pages.

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this is a gap

Printed on Arches BFK 250gsm paper, the book is hand sewn with no adhesives, and has a pale grey Magnani Pescia loose wrap cover, embossed with the title.

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this is a gap

The text is hand-set in metal type, using English Garamond, and printed on a Vandercook SP 20 press in a silver ink.

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this is a gap

What you have seen here is only a selection of the 40 pages. Painstakingly produced, this book is available in a limited edition of 16 copies. The dimensions of the book are 250 x 150 x 5mm.

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COLLABORATORS

Dr Sarah Rice is a ceramicist and art theorist whose philosophical bent has influenced many art students at the ANU School of Art.

Patsy Payne is a renowned printmaker, and is currently Head of Printmedia & Drawing at the ANU School of Art. She designed the book, produced the lithography stones, and pounced the drawings.

Ampersand Duck set and printed the text, and bound the books.

Shellaine Godbold is a fabulous artist and she did the lithography editioning (with flair).

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this is a gap

Available now for Aus$450 plus p&h. Contact me for more details or to purchase. I will send you an invoice that can be paid by Paypal, EFT or cheque.

All money from the book is being donated to Sarah Rice.

Shared Rooms: Poems by Anna Akhmatova with Translations by Natalie Staples and Imitations by Rosemary Dobson and David Campbell

Letterpress and monoprints on Zerkal Wove paper, housed in screenprinted acetate envelopes, contained in a bookcloth-covered box with a perspex drawer (boxed) or a printed card slipcase (softbound ). English text handset in Perpetua and Times; Russian text set in Latinski and printed by letterpress using photopolymer plates.

2 edns: 5 boxed, 6 softbound. Canberra: PM&D and EABS, National Institute of the Arts, 2002.

This was my Honours project for the completion of my Visual Arts degree.

Around the year 2000, I came across a pile of drafts of these poems in the bottom drawer of a cupboard at Rosemary Dobson’s house. Immediately I saw their potential for an artist’s book.

Rosemary Dobson (1920- ) and David Campbell (1915-79), both celebrated Australian poets, would for many years meet with Natalie Staples (1933- ), a scholar of Russian literature then working at the Australian National University. Natalie, knowing their tastes in poetry, provided excellent literal translations of poems by Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) and her colleague Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938), as well as by other lesser-known Russian poets. Rosemary and David would discuss them, then take them away and write their own versions, coming back for the next session to discuss what they had produced and start the process again with another poem.

These shared poems were twice given an opportunity to emerge publicly: Moscow Trefoil (Canberra: ANU Press, 1975), and Seven Russian Poets (St Lucia: UQP, 1979), now both out of print. In the former, Natalie’s versions were joined by both or either versions by Rosemary and David; in the latter, only one version was printed, without the literal translations. There has never been a book with all four states: the original Russian, the literal translation, and both ‘imitations’. Using letterpress, I was only able to reproduce four poems in the time available; in the National Library of Australia, where the papers are now housed, I have found over 150 poems shared by this group of writers.

Anna Akhmatova is regarded as Russia’s greatest female poet. She was extremely popular before the Russian Revolution, and suffered great tribulations as a consequence of her fame after the Revolution. She and Mandelstam were persecuted by Stalin, banned from writing and treated as enemies of the State. Mandelstam was exiled to a labour camp, where he died; Akmativa was followed, spied upon, and her family jailed and harassed. Her life was lived in shared rooms, and her poetry written in secret expect for two periods: 1923-40 and 1946-56, when for various reasons she found herself in tenuous favour. Like Mandelstam, whose poetry survives because his wife stashed it and his friends memorised it, Akhmatova’s poetry is famous because it has been shared by people who appreciate it, and by translation. Each poem is a room in which many minds have sat and discussed the world and its nuances; just like the rooms in which David, Rosemary and Natalie shared their interpretations.

I wanted a layout that allowed the poems to be read in any order, mixed and matched, allowed to flow between or away from interpretations. They are presented like letters in a drawer, collated in envelopes (themselves overprinted with original manuscript reproductions) and able to be arranged within the drawer spaces to be read and reread in myriad combinations.

A note on my choice of poems: three of the four poems are most of a series called ‘Northern Elegies’ (also sometimes called the Leningrad Elegies). ‘Three Autumns’, the poem I have placed first, is not part of this series. I decided to include it as an introduction because the first of the Northern Elegies is less universal in theme than the other three: it is heavily rooted in Russian culture and geography and requires more knowledge of Akhmatova’s context. ‘Three Autumns’ was written around the same time as Northern Elegies II, segues nicely into NE II’s first line, and shares similar themes to the other poems, so I have substituted it as the first of the four poems.

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Artist’s book

BFK Rives White 250gsm paper, watercolour, thread. Text (from a song by Machine Translations) produced using wood type letterpress. A set of two concertina books in an edition of 3, boxed.
Aus$400 + p&h. 

[The text below is cross-posted from my personal blog]

The Pillowbooks is an artist’s book comprising a complementary pair of concertinas. It was made for my exhibition Pressings: Recycled Bookwork, and sat so quietly in the show that I don’t think many people noticed it.

The rationale for my exhibition was that the works in it were made from the remnants of other work; there were altered commercial books and pieces made from larger/more formal book projects that I’d been working on over the years. When I printed Transmigration, a fine press book of poems by Nan McDonald and drawings by Jan Brown, I printed the edition on paper called BFK Rives Green, which is a lovely eucalypt grey-green colour. I also printed a much smaller, spare edition on BFK Rives White, and those pages are still sitting waiting for me to resolve them… but there were off-cuts from both editions. The green offcuts became part of the fine press books by becoming endpapers, and some of the white off-cuts became The Pillowbooks.

It’s a devilishly hard work to document, because the back piece is clean-embossed and standing, which means that the light is never right for a photograph. The front piece lays flat, which also makes it hard to get a good clear shot at the same time as the back piece.

So I’ll describe them to you: The Pillowbooks is a set of two concertina book-structures containing the same piece of text. The text is paraphrased from a song called Be My Pillow, by Australian outfit Machine Translations, from the album Happy. This is what the MT website says about the song:

Be My Pillow is about a great love affair between two home-furnishing impersonators.

Yes. Well, right. In fact, it is a full-bodied, multi-layered and heart-smackingly rich paean of yearning that sounds amazing through headphones and that I never get sick of. The words on these sheets of paper are

NO WAIT NO STAY
I WANT YOU TO
BE MY PILLOW

I was listening to the song one day and it made me think about relationships as pillows: how when you’re not in a relationship, you yearn for the comfort and companionship of a lasting relationship, and then when you are in the thick of a comforting long relationship, you can still yearn for the crispness and freshness of a new encounter. And from another angle: being aware that any relationship worth its salt doesn’t stay fresh and surprising; it wears in, gets comfortable, becomes old. If it goes past comfortable, becomes lumpy, do you accept that and keep on, or do you look elsewhere? If I stick with the pillow as metaphor here, do you keep the old pillow or buy a new one? Do you freshen up with a new pillow but hold on to the old pillow for sitting up in bed, for support? Do you ever just want to borrow a pillow for a while if you’re feeling a bit flat at someone else’s house? Is using someone else’s pillow wrong? Do you think upgrading is decadent, unfaithful? Do you hate holding on to old things, and prefer making a fresh start every few years? Does the idea of taking off the pillowcase and seeing the pillow stains make you feel queasy? Do you leave pillow maintenance to somebody else?

Pillow books have been described as “a collection of notebooks or notes which have been collated to show a period of someone or something’s life.”

So here are two ‘pillows’: one is fresh, white, crisp, stiff, embossed with the words (I used wood type, printed letterpress), folded in one concertina direction so that the first fold is a valley-fold, hand-sewn at one end (like the decorative end of a pillowcase) with crisp unwaxed linen thread that emerges from the thick fluffy paper jauntily. The paper deckle is at the top of the sheet, so the concertina can stand upright.

The other is folded in the opposite direction, mountain-first, and lays horizontal. It has also been embossed with wood-type, but the indented letters have been stained with watercolour, in the colour that pillows go underneath the pillowcases, from pools of drool and seeping hair-grease. The hand-sewn threads at the decorative end are limp and aged (really old: antique Victorian-era cotton, straight from the factory spool!). The paper deckle is at the base of the sheet; it doesn’t stand up easily, and is quite unstable when it does.

Old, new. Fresh, used. Permanent, temporary. Loved, rejected. People can have such differing viewpoints about what is necessary, what is important, what they like/dislike/value. All of these thoughts sit in this simple piece of work.

I like the idea of making work that connects with specific pieces of music. So much of what I do and think about is accompanied by a soundtrack in my head, and to make concrete connections with this soundtrack excites me. I think hearing Be My Pillow is important to the reception of this work, but of course it isn’t essential. It’s an optional enhancement.

no wait
no stay
this will help you
along the way
no love
is lost
and i want you
to be my pillow
(extract from lyrics written by J.Walker)

The Pillowbooks, 2009.

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Artist’s book (ongoing, from 2005).

ACT Government parking vouchers in a yellow manilla Japanese binding and slipcase, c. 120 x 60 x 10mm. Canberra: Ampersand Duck, first copy in 2005. Limited edition of 10.

This playful little book is an ongoing exploration of the nature of inbuilt obsolescence. Parking vouchers are printed to exist in the moment, deliberately fading to void the transaction. Time Limit Applies allows the reader to witness the disintegration of the various components of the text/image into a white void. Consequently it should be viewed as a work in progress – or rather, retrogress.

The first TLA binding, 2005

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Artist’s book.

Manipulated digital inkjet images in a hand-bound black-paper-covered coptic-sewn photo album. Vintage button tie. 210 x 152 x 18mm. Edition of 2. Canberra: Ampersand Duck, 2005.  AVAILABLE

Family photos are redolent with memories and associations. When one member of the family chooses to die, everything changes. Images are no longer simple narratives or innocent souvenirs; they become tainted by what is left behind.

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