|
|
The short answer lies here.
Otherwise:
The ANU School of Art has a special place in my heart. It, along with the Australian National University in general, is one of my life’s sacred sites. Way before I ever thought of going there (when I was doing an Arts degree in very non-art subjects), I lived in group houses with art students and earned money there by life modelling. When I discovered that they had a great letterpress set-up, and that letterpress was my destiny (it was really like that: a major epiphany weekend), I went to night classes at the school to build up a portfolio, and then I went to the school itself as a student. Straight after graduating, I was hired by the bit of the school that has a letterpress studio and I’ve been there ever since, teaching and helping. I even design their promotional flyers, some years.
Every year I see students that I think would be fun to work with. Sometimes they’ve been in one of my classes, sometimes I’ve just seen their work around the school and thought that it would translate well to print. That’s why I decided to join the Emerging Artist Support Scheme (EASS) which the school has in place to help students transition to a world without art school.
EASS is a bundle of fun, ranging from international scholarships to cash prizes to residencies. There are also collectors who happily use the scheme to get first pick of the [...]
I love the moment in a residency (says she, with the wisdom of only two residencies) when you realise that it’s ok, everything will be finished in time. Mind you, with both experiences that realisation came quite late in the piece, but maybe that’s normal.
When we finished printing, the time came for writing. I have to admit, getting the parents to send in addresses for the kids to use was a bit like herding cats, and to mimimise the stress we (the teachers and I in conference) made a commitment that if we hadn’t received a separate address, the child would just send their postcard to their family at home. Happily, there was a Learning Journey morning just at the right time (where the parents come in & accompany their children in a series of classroom tasks to see how much they’ve progressed in the year) and we got a heap of addresses that way.
These are the Pre-school postcards, scribed by the assistant, Tora, who had her last day at the school on the day we posted their cards.
Because the Pre-schoolers only attended Mondays to Thursdays, we posted their cards on the last Thursday of my residency, and the rest of the school on the Friday.
Here they all are, with Fiona the wonder-teacher, getting prepped to walk down to the post office.
…and here they are, arriving at the Post [...]
Pre-amble ramble
The other day I walked into the Principal’s office (where I’ve been stashing my bag of a day) and she asked me what I’d learned that day. What haven’t I learned! The school’s motto, Together we learn, together we grow, is a philosophy I really support, as any of my adult class participants would tell you. I often learn as much from my students as they learn from me.
When I was in NZ this time last year, my main learning outcome was ink handling, through weeks of hand-rolling my type for a flat-bed iron hand-press. This year I’ve learned to create simple but organised systems when working with children so that they can be as creative as possible and I don’t get lost along the way. Children are so mindblowingly full of creative energy that their educating adults have to spend most of their time working out ways to structure and contain that energy, whilst also trying to encourage it.
So: once we finished printing their names in letterpress, I spent time during the Book and Numlit weeks printing the backs of the postcards using photopolymer plate and my home press.
As you can see, we had two versions of the writing lines. The top is for Years 1 and 2, and the bottom version is for Kindy and Pre-school, as their writing is so much bigger. The rest is all the stuff that makes the funding go around, like logos and ownership [...]
Bringing the fun of pen & ink to small children. [...]
Book Week teaching during my primary school residency. [...]
My residency at the O’Connor Cooperative School, 2011 [...]
Prime, from Otakou Press, 2010: my NZ residency results. [...]
Work in progress from my 2010 Dunedin print residency [...]
ANU EASS Broadside Residencies [...]
Game Over broadsides: Natalie Azzopardi (2010) [...]
|
|