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.

I worked out a design for the book’s prospectus (a promotional flyer for the book that includes an example of the book’s paper and printing process) that utilised one of the poems on the page, but after I’d torn down and guillotined and folded them and sent them off to (hopefully) interested parties, I was still left with a large pile of one particular poem: Grieving.

The words to Grieving go:

Friends die, one after another;
Each time a dark disorder
A ceaseless banging of shutters

Upstairs there, in the mind;
Bearing of wings, loud weather
Days, nights together.

To force on the mind order:
Journeys taken on maps,
Attentive delving into

The roots of the language.
A search for the true invention
Of form by line in drawing.

Also, renewal of linen—
Keeping the old customs
Putting sides to middles.

Thus, mind and hand stilled
And with a gentler grief
To draw down the blind

The white holland blind
Like a banner of love
Against that wild confusion.

(© the poet, published in Rosemary Dobson, Poems to Hold or Let Go, Canberra: Ampersand Duck, 2009)

There are so many great ideas in there that translate to paper: language, drawing, form, line, linen (or in this case, rag), folding, ritual, the mindfulness of repetitive movement and simple motions.

I decided to make something out of this forlorn and seductive pile of paper, and once I started working with it, I couldn’t stop. My solo exhibition at Megalo Print Access in September 2009, Pressings: Recycled Bookwork, had four pieces made from this one pile of poem, grouped into two pairs:

This is all four pieces (or both pairs) in situ at Megalo, although the one on the far left (in the foreground, not on the wall on the left, which is a completely different work altogether) is cut off. The first two are plinth works, made of small geometric folded elements that can be reconfigured in various ways depending upon mood, inclination and plinth size.

Grieving 1: Folding the Sheets and Sides to Middles

This is Grieving: Folding the Sheets. All of the pieces shift incrementally in size, and the largest, single centrepiece has an inky black centre made from overlaid black inked fingerprints.

Here’s a closer, vertical view. You can see the text of the poem, again and again, alternating in direction, forming a rhythm.

This is the piece that was hiding in the room view above: Grieving: Sides to Middles. These folded elements of paper are not hand-inked, but run through the press rollers at the end of printing, which gave them a very light, even, almost gauze-like black texture.

Folding sides to middles is an old laundry ritual, where worn sheets would be cut in half and resewing them with the less worn edges now in the centre, where they would get more wear. It is also a very evocative line for me when working with paper, either folding sheets (of paper) for bookbinding or when using origami methods.

Grieving 2: Hold and Let Go

The second pair is quite different, and is site specific, although it could probably be installed again at any other gallery that has white walls

This is Grieving: Hold, and it is a unique piece constructed from a vintage book spine, antique thread (bought still on its Victorian-era factory bobbin) and pieces of the poem. It is mounted on a metal rod that inserts into the wall, and you can view it from both sides.

This is the obverse side. It’s very hard to photograph. Here’s a detail of that page panel, handsewn:

I love the shadow of the text on the other side.

Grieving: Let Go, it’s companion piece, is much freer. It is another work that can change shape at will. This time it was a tree of kites taking off from a book spine, but maybe in the future it can be something else:

Another one that is hard to photograph.

It was very meditative and calming to make these works. A few months later, I made a final Grieving work, and now I think I’ve redeemed that printing mistake, well and truly.

These works are all for sale or available for exhibition. If you are interested, please get in contact.

Julie’s brief was this: This project was borne out of the recent sudden death of my father, a handkerchief, some emotive words written by a sibling on his death and the traumatic aftermath of a death processed according to particular societal and cultural mores. Interested artists and Individuals are invited to create an artwork on a hankerchief (any hankerchief not necessarily a man’s) based around death/grief/bereavement and return it to me by end of May, 2010 for inclusion in a collaborative exhibition in June.

I’d just finished a whole body of work centred upon a poem by Rosemary Dobson that I’d accidentally overprinted during the production of her collection, Poems to Hold or Let Go. I worked with the pages in various ways: overprinting them, using origami on them to form sculptural elements, and I thought that this would be a chance to finish the process, to draw a veil across this particular train of thought. I see this as a broadside rather than anything book-related.

I’ve had an old linen hankie in my ‘collection’ box (or one of them, specifically the textiles one) for years — and isn’t it great when things finally find a purpose? I can’t remember if this one has special family significance or if it was given to me by someone… I wouldn’t have bought it. It’s gorgeous, with real handmade lace around the edges.

The text of the poem was transferred from the original letterpress print to the hankie by eucalyptus transfer (which leaves a wonderful lingering scent of eucalyptus, very Australian) and then I used some antique thread to hand-stitch a weeping thread veil over the text. It really is antique — it comes straight off a Victorian-era factory bobbin and has marvellous slubs and stains through it.

The Hankie Project link above gives a post to each entry in the exhibition, which looked wonderful. I’m sure there are plans to travel the works, so it might turn up somewhere near you. If you’re ever in Alstonville, on the far north coast of NSW (an easy daytrip from Brisbane), visit Julie’s gallery, which specialises in artists’ books and print works.

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.

Blue, 2010. Unique artist’s book of found text collaged onto a pianola roll fragment. Available.

Book arts is such a broad spectrum of things; sometimes I make things that start as a traditional book idea and end up far more sculptural. In my head, sculpture is defined as an object that can’t be handled. This piece is so fragile that it shouldn’t be handled, and so it can only sit on a plinth or shelf and be looked at. Mind you, there are many old books in the world that can be described in the same way!

Blue is the result of my finding a number of pianola rolls in an old bookshop. A number of them were in good condition, and intact, and so lovely that I have put them aside for a while, intending to use them eventually — or not, because one day I might find someone who can use them without destroying them. This particular roll shattered easily, and pulled apart at a simple tug, and seemed the perfect metaphor for a fragile ego.

The  notation holes, when the roll is turned sideways to its original purpose, reminded me of electronic music, and as I thought about this, my eye followed the pale, dotted, almost carbon-paper blue line that ran along the length of the yellowing paper and I started humming New Order’s song Blue Monday.

I wrote down the lyrics and marvelled at how simple and timeless they are. There is nothing except the sound of the music to link it to any particular time or place. I thought to myself that I could probably find all the words I needed from any of the old novels I have piled in my studio for recycling. With that in mind, I looked through all the old books to see if any of them had faded to the same colour as the pianola roll, and to my delight, the only one that had was a cheap copy of Louisa M. Alcott’s Little Women. I found all the necessary words within one section of the book (a sewn section that is easily unpicked, as opposed to a chapter), and thus Blue came into being.

Blue was made for the group exhibition 3 Chords and the Truth at ANCA Gallery in April/May, 2010.

Feel the Fell. Unique artist’s book of letterpress and offset letterpress ink on Chinese roll paper with handsewn whirlwind binding. Text by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Design and production by Ampersand Duck.
Held in the Artspace Mackay Collection, Queensland, Australia.

Feel the Fell was made for my solo show, Pressings, at Megalo in 2009. I often run pieces of paper through my press rollers at the end of the day to remove the excess ink before cleaning, and I keep every piece of paper, because I love the random and beautiful results. They speak to me of the process of printing (especially when I have used packing sheets, and there is overprinted embossed text that is picked up by the ink) and the process is a primary part of the experience of using letterpress, because the final printed product is often so similar to something that can be produced more easily by other printing methods.

Anyway, this piece came together when I was browsing through my high school copy of Norton’s Anthology and my eyes were caught by some lines I’d read years ago and had underlined, and then forgotten:

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.

I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

And the first lines seemed all I needed to unlock an emotional darkness that the ink seemed perfectly eloquent enough to convey. It’s a very specific poem, but the despair is universal, and so I let the marks do their work.

It’s a lovely piece to look through, and until Artspace Mackay bought it, I encouraged people to use their hands without white gloves to flick through it (and now it is doomed to white-glove-dom forever!). You can see white gloves peeping through some of the images here… After a day or two of having them there, I decided they weren’t necessary, because most of the beauty is in the way the soft paper feels in your hands.

I made a box for it to live in, in which it rolls up like a scroll. The box is covered with a black slubbed bookcloth called Cannapetta, and has hand-stitched detail and ties in black waxed linen thread.

It was also exhibited at the 2010 Libris Awards in Mackay.

I also made a smaller version of this book for a friend who loved it but couldn’t buy the original. That one is also unique, and lives in Melbourne, hopefully being loved and handled. It’s box is recycled from an old bible.

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

this is a gap

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.

this is a gap

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.

this is a gap

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).

this is a gap

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.

Contact me for more details or to purchase. I will send you an invoice that can be paid by Paypal, EFT or cheque.

Artist’s book.

Viewed from the side in one of the many possible configurations

Unique letterpress concertina-bound book with removable hard cover and slipcase. c.100 x 100 x 50mm. Canberra: Ampersand Duck, 2005. Private Collection.

I often make small books from the remnants of larger projects, and this is the first of them. Playing with Anna’s Ghosts is a playful book with a concertina binding, removable hard covers and a half-slip wrapper. The title is a pun on the use of typesetting proofs and the contents of the text, which are poetry scraps from the printing of Shared Rooms. The book can be configured in as many ways as the scraps of text can be read.

view from above when arranged in a circle

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.

Contact me for more details or to purchase. I will send you an invoice that can be paid by Paypal, EFT or cheque.