If your browser won’t load the image, click here to be taken to the digital file.

The hard copy is 240 x 92mm, printed on two weights of Kraft paper and hand-sewn in a horizontal format. If you would like to purchase a copy, wave your mouse over the top of this page to find the red drop-down Duckshop link. Or contact me directly.

For images of the production, have a look at my letterpress flickr set. For the story of its production, click here.

There are only five of these residencies granted every year, and I applied for it on a whim, because I’d decided that I liked the energy of small children, and wanted to interact with them a bit more. The fact that I was matched up with this particular school was very exciting. For one thing, there’s only 80 children in the whole school! It’s tiny, friendly, and extremely open-minded and progressive. They have solar-passive buildings, they keep chooks, and they recycle and reuse as an everyday activity. The school is on my ‘flight-path’, which means that I get to ride my bike there (when I’m not lugging materials and heavy equipment around), and the staff are amazing, generous and fun.

Unlike other years, when artists had to apply with a fully-formed idea, this time we were encouraged only to talk about our general practice and what we thought about making art with early learners, and then the final project would be fully negotiated between the artist and the school. Obviously I did ok with my pitch, and I have to mention here the help I got from my wonderful friend Amelia, who works professionally with art and children. Then I sat down with the OCS headmistress, Margaret, and her sidekick, Bec, and we nutted out a really fun project called POSTMARK MAIL ART. I always write it in caps, because it just needs to be shouted to the roof.

Here is nearly the whole school population (bar the preschoolers), ready to go for their weekly run up the park behind their schoolyard (they’re in training for the Canberra Fun Run, but they don’t know it yet). I’d just been to their assembly, where I’d talked to them about sending postcards and other things through the mail. Ready, set, GO!

Originally I’d wanted to print the backs of the postcards with a commercially-produced polymer plate (which included all the logos etc that needed to be included) and then the kids would make their own solar plates & print the fronts; this was all well & good until I did some test plates and discovered that the solar plates just didn’t work well with water-based inks, and I didn’t want them wallowing in oil-based ink.

So. I had a frenzied rethink, and went back to an earlier notion of combining letterpress and other, simpler techniques, and I’m glad I have now, because it’s allowing a lot more play and experimentation. I’m still doing the backs with a plate, but the rest is much more tactile.

This week we started printing. I took in my tabletop Adana platen press and a tray of type (48p Gill) and a pre-set chase ready to slot in their names. I set up my ‘printshop’ outside under cover in the playground (because we are using oil-based ink for this phase and it smells), and each child comes to me and sets their name themselves, then I put the chase in the press and I help them work the lever to print the cards.

They are printing an edition of four cards each: one for posting, one for keeping, and one for the school to keep. The fourth one is a spare one, to practice and allow for mistakes. The school copies will be bound together using a single coptic binding into a souvenir of the experience. I’ll get the kids to write a sentence on those ones on what they liked about the process.

Here’s some progress shots:

This is me in my printer’s hat. Every day I make a new one out of newspaper, and I wear it in the printshop, and the most enthusiastic child (or the one who remembers to ask at the end of the day) gets to take it home to keep. I look a bit sombre, but that’s because I’d given my camera to one of the children to shoot me, and I had no control over when he took the shot. I hadn’t smiled yet! The hat isn’t an affectation; it’s a very practical and cheap way of keeping stray bits of hair off your face and out of the ink. I haven’t perfected the size yet; the pattern allows you to adjust the size to fir anyone, and that day’s hat was a bit high, they’re meant to sit about halfway along your forehead (if you click on that printer’s hat link, you’ll see what I mean).

Here’s Ruby, selecting her name from my typecase. The kids love this bit, and are quite intrigued by the backwardness of it all.

And then she puts her name into the allotted spot in the chase, and I put it into the press.

And here’s Oscar, having just printed his second postcard. I set it up with the name in one corner, and a few stars in the diagonally opposite corner to balance the pressure. What child doesn’t like stars? They will fill the rest of the space with more basic printmaking later in the term.

So that’s where I’m up to; I’ve printed with about a third of the children to date, and because it work with them one on one, I get some marvellous conversations about type, printing, names, hats, pets, Christmas carols, and whatever else pops into their heads.

And the energy! I so admire those teachers; I’m already exhausted!

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!)

Craft ACT approached me, asking for an exclusive line of cards that could, among other things, be used as condolence cards! Apparently they get occasional enquiries after cards that could fit that bill.

Once I got thinking and printing, I was hooked.  So, I present to you my first line of letterpress cards, sold exclusively at the Craft ACT shop:

White Light: a vintage letterpress cut and 36pt Latin Elongated typeface, printed in pewter ink on Fabriano Tiepolo paper and accompanied by a metallic pewter envelope. 140 x 140mm. Limited edition of 45 prints.

Black Light: a vintage letterpress cut and 36pt Latin Elongated typeface, printed in silver ink on Black cardstock and accompanied by a Marshmallow white envelope. 140 x 140mm. Limited edition of 50 prints.

Sorry Tree: wood type printed in a metallic brown ink onto a hand-rolled sea-green background ‘smudge’, printed on Fabriano Tiepolo paper and accompanied by a recycled brown envelope. 140 x 140mm. Limited edition of 40 prints.

Mulberry Love : 2-colour wood type print in orange and mulberry, printed on Fabriano Tiepolo paper and accompanied by a metallic moss envelope. 140 x 140mm. Limited edition of 45 prints.

Aren’t they nice? More soon. Each edition is limited, meaning that if I use that design again, it will be in a completely different colour run. Hopefully they won’t last long, so don’t miss out…

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.

I was one of the Called, and I designed and printed some very little letterpress broadsides. I didn’t have a lot of time to work on them, as I was preparing to travel to NZ to make some much bigger broadsides. Funnily enough, printing small is just as tricky, maybe even more so, than printing big. So the edition sizes for each poster varies. And there’s one series of images, and then a few fun ones that just begged to be made.

If you’d like to see the process of putting the exhibition together, and all the wonderful studio visits made by Anna-Maria to the craftspeople involved, here’s a link to all of her posts on the subject.

THE SERIES

These letters do not spell anything out deliberately; they were chosen to go with the images, which are little metal ornaments that I bought from eBay years ago. Feel free to make them spell things; Anna-Maria made them spell R&D in the show, others may want the word FORD, or maybe your name is DROF. Heh. The letters are 72pt Gill Sans, printed in a bright sexy red. All have little hand-filed deckles at the head and tail, and are numbered and signed.

Each of these is 45 x 32 mm in dimension, so you’re probably looking at them at a larger scale (which won’t do them any favours).

They’re not really meant to be lined up together, so I didn’t put a lot of effort into making the height of AMPERSAND DUCK match up. I designed each one as an individual, taking into account the balance of each image on the ‘page’.

Edition numbers are:

D: Dragonfly — 20

O: Owl — 20

R: Rat — 20

&: Ampersand — 10

F: Frog: 20

They are all still available.

THE OTHERS

Speaks for itself.

45 x 32mm, in an edition of 9. Still available.

Hammer Time. Hand-coloured.

55 x 32mm. Edition of 6. Still available.

Almost Ace. I just love this one. In amongst a box of miscellaneous letterpress stuff was this tiny little logo with the letters ACF, and I’ve looked at it for years wondering if anything could be done with it or should I just chuck it. One day… BING! I saw the way forward.

Printed on red Japanese washi, 42 x 30mm. Edition of 11. Still available.

All of these broadsides are Aus$15 each plus p&h.

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.

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.