One weekend in April, my friend Angela Gardner arrived from Brisbane to spend a night and a day with me. Angela is a printmaker and poet, and byrd and I used one of her poems for our Demolition piece at Print Big a few years ago.
Tag Archives: broadside
Pattern for Plain Heart (2012)
I’m chuffed to be able to say that the 2012 edition of Matrix journal will have a feature on my work (along with the Wayzgoose Press, written by Andrew Schuller), and I was asked to produce a tip-in print for them. It’s an amazing journal, still produced completely by The Whittington Press by John Randle et al using letterpress, and judging by the fact that I had to print around 750 prints, it has a strong following.
Helani and Jon print up a storm
Helani Laisk and Jon Webster were the 2011 ANU EASS Ampersand Duck Broadside residents. I tend to write about them together, because they worked in the studio in the same time period, on different days, and they are good friends who went through art school together. However, they are very separate individuals in their art practices and the results of their printing time, despite using some similar processes, are very different and entirely filled with their own personalities. Continue reading
Revelation, 2012
Revelation was one of those poems that grabbed me by the throat the first time I read it. It was in an anthology of poems about Sydney, and was right at the back. I knew I wanted to print it, and set about finding the poet. Usually that’s a pretty straightforward process, but this time it wasn’t. Continue reading
Discontent (2012)
Do you know that next week’s Transit of Venus (when the planet Venus crosses the sun) will be the last in our lifetime? According to the Transit of Venus Australia website,
Transits of Venus occur in a pattern that repeats every 243 years with pairs of transits eight years apart separated by gaps of 121½ years and 105½ years. Venus and the Earth are aligned in the same direction out from the Sun about every 584 days (this is called in conjunction), however a transit does not occur each time because Venus’s orbit is usually above or below the Sun in the sky. Since the phenomena was first recognized there have only been six transits of Venus – 1639, 1761, 1769, 1874, 1882 and the most recent one in 2004. The 6th June 2012 transit is our last opportunity to observe a transit of Venus, as the next event occurs on 11th December 2117.
What are EASS residencies?
Peter McLean & Sky
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. Continue reading
Miniature broadsides, 2010
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. Continue reading
Prime, from Otakou Press
In August and September 2010, I was Printer in Residence at the Otakou Press, which resides at the University of Otago Library in Dunedin, NZ. Continue reading
Printing poets at Otago
Written live from my 2010 residency:
Twenty years ago, I visited Dunedin for a couple of days on a NZ touring holiday and loved it at first sight. I always hoped to get back here, and every time John Howard threatened to win an election, I would joke with my friends and family that I’d move to Dunedin if he did. I was getting quite serious when Kevin Rudd saved the day. Now I’ve made it back, thanks to a brilliant residency opportunity, and I’m telling people that if Tony Abbott wins, I may not go back to Australia. I’m getting quite serious about it. Continue reading