(A detail from Scott Lyon’s Fleurons exhibition at Postbox 141 in the city)
Melbourne didn’t really behave itself for Impact7; I know everyone makes jokes about the city having four seasons in one day, but to turn on its wettest Spring day in 100 years was just showing off, don’t you think? On the wednesday, while I was sitting at my folio table showing my wares and talking to people, the sky went pitch black and the inside lights started flickering as lightning and thunder raged outside.
Luckily the conference was mostly indoors (unlike the filming session of Winners and Losers attempting to work on the grass just outside the conference) so apart from a wild wet trip over to another Monash campus for an exhibition opening, we all stayed pretty snug.
Impact7 was a densely-packed intellectual experience. In fact, many complained that there was too much content, and indeed, with six parallel sessions at any one time that weren’t strictly aligned, it was very hard to mix and match the papers and try to catch a broad range of topics. There were many streams of subject matter, from traditional printmaking to digital media, from letterpress to artists’ books. The two hot topics seemed to be cross-media platforms and artists’ books. I can’t speak for the media sessions (merely that there were a lot of them), but every session on books was standing-room only.
Highlights of the conference for me were (in no particular order):
All of [...]