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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.
The residency fell into my lap, through the generosity of master printer Alan Loney, who took it upon himself to introduce me to Donald Kerr, the Otago University Special Collections Librarian, when we were all at a conference in Brisbane called The Limits of the Book. Donald has custodianship of a wonderful collection of printing equipment, originally established as a bibliography teaching aid, and while continuing to be used as such, has also become a press in its own right: the Otakou Press. Established in 2003, it hosts an annual short-term printer in residence who produces a work that is sold – and usually sold out before the project is finished – and funds the next PIR the next year. The residency is now totally self-funded, and includes travel, accommodation (which includes food) and a stipend.
Donald and I had wonderful talks in Brisbane, about letterpress, the history of the equipment, and his liking of posters. Up to now all the printers had been New Zealanders, men, and had made books. Time for a change! We decided that I would be the 2010 PIR, and we would make posters, preferably using some of the wood type in the collection, which had scarcely been utilised.
We decided to have six poets, three from NZ and three from Australia. Donald picked out some names and emailed them all to see if they were amenable. Peter Porter and Les Murray were on his list, but PP died soon after, and we didn’t hear from Les, so we ended up with Vincent O’Sullivan, Michael Harlow and Sue Wootton batting on the NZ side, and Robert Adamson, Sarah Holland-Batt and Stephen Edgar for the Aussie side.
And then Donald got a letter in the post from Les, who doesn’t do computers. He’d LOVE to be in it. And, we both agreed, you can’t say no to Les. So. We had SEVEN poets, and I just didn’t have the time in the residency to add an extra NZer – seven was going to be pushing it. Did I mention that my edition is to be 100 of each, plus title page and colophon? That’s 900 pages, over a period of six weeks.
There was only so much planning I could do beforehand, since I hadn’t seen the type selection: read the poems (each poet sent a small selection of small, in most cases unpublished, poems to choose from) and select one for each, and make notes about what each inspired visually when I read them. We’d decided upon paper stock, and ordered it: Fabriano Rosapina, a lovely thick white Italian paper, that would need to be hand-torn into quarter-sheets.
The poems I picked didn’t seem to have any connecting theme, apart from my liking them, so I decided to go with the idea that their number inspired and call the folio PRIME, playing with the idea of seven as a prime number and also that these are poets in their prime. Since then I have realised that the connection is one of process (in the use of wood type) and that the title could have reflected that, but I’m happy with Prime.
Then
Arriving at the University of Otago, settling in to my digs at the very comfy St Margaret’s College, and getting to know my way around were all the easy things to do at the start of my residency. Dunedin is beautiful, even in the depth of winter, and surprisingly warmer than Canberra, owing to what everyone says is a mild winter. The big learning curve was tackling the presses in the print room…
I am used to printing with a cylinder flatbed letterpress, which has built-in rollers that ink the type and can be adjusted to stay at a level that rolls the type the same way every time. Here in Dunedin, they have iron hand-presses only, which means that the printer has to hand-roll the ink onto the type every time they pull a print.
The up side of that is that you can print multiple colours at once. The down side is that you have to develop a good technique of rolling sensitively to the type’s needs, and evenly, and neatly. Every time. And I had to learn how to do it FAST, because there were those 900 pages to print, and time was ticking.
I’m talking in the past tense here, but as I write I’m still in the thick of it. I’m nearly halfway through my third week of the residency, and I’m only 300 pages in…
This is the Columbian press, the grand madam of the room. She’s my press of choice from the three available to me, with her bobbing eagle counterweight and decorative dragons. I had a crash course in using her, including how to make my own brown-paper tympans and friskets.
The fact that I have to hand-roll the type, lower the frisket then the tympan, roll the bed under the platen and then pull the press handle for every. single. print. means that I am physically limited as to how intricate and/or layered these prints can be. I need to design them to be striking without being overly hard to produce.
I am also limited by the colours available to me. I can mix colours, but that means I also have to judge how much mixed ink I need for a print run, and the amount of ink varies according to how much surface area there is on the type; wood type is generally broad-surfaced and thirsty, whereas metal type is smaller and finer, needing finer layers of ink rolled with a lighter touch. When I first arrived, I only had blue, red, yellow, black and a transparent mixing white, but an ex-commercial printer who now works at the Uni of Otago library brought in a gift of some pristine tins of Pantone colours: a variety of reds (rhodamine, rubine, warm red, all fabulous and important distinctions when mixing colours), a green, orange and a good dense rich black that does not shade into grey like most offset blacks. A most welcome gift, and one I’m using gratefully.
The other limitation, or maybe I should say, addition to the palette of choices, is the type itself. The Otakou press has a house font, Garamond, which is one I use extensively in my studio as well. So there is a healthy amount of that, plus a number of drawers of assorted fonts like Gill, Imprint Shadow, Plantin, Gothic Condensed, but not in any great quantity or variety of sizes. There is also a lot of very beautiful wood type, in many sizes (wood type is measured in ‘lines’ but I don’t know what ‘lines’ actually means).
So, to print a poem as a poster, no matter what my idea is, I have to find a font that not only suits the feel of the poem, but also has enough characters in the drawer to set the whole poem and whatever I want to use around the page. I had to count every character in every poem and make a chart of the alphabet needs so that for each layout I can make sure that I can make the poem before I get halfway through and discover that there aren’t enough Hs or something. And you know poets… they tend to use strings of words with the same letters, even if they aren’t conscious that they’re doing it (I don’t even mean alliteration or rhyme… I mean just repetitions of letters generally).
My first attempt was a shape poem by NZ poet Sue Wootton, called No Strings Banjo. Donald thought that this would be one of the hardest poems to tackle, but actually, making a shape in letterpress is fairly easy if you stick to the basic principles of keeping all the lines the same length and making a shape within a block, like building pixels.
This turned into this:
Please excuse the torn base and the handwriting; this was my bon-a-tirer (good to print) reference copy for editioning purposes.
I didn’t know that Sue was from Dunedin until she walked into the studio for a peek, and to my delight she was delighted with the layout, and adored the Fancy Western wood type as much as I do.
I wasted a lot of paper on that first edition, until I worked out my rolling technique. Donald forgave me, as he knew I’d been chucked in at the deep end. I thought the edition printed ok finally, but I know that by the time I get to the end of the residency, I’ll look back at the quality of this first run and shudder.
The next batch, because I had such a clear picture in my head of the print, was Les Murray’s At the Opera. Donald wanted COLOUR, and so I decided to give him some red, a good patchy red velvet curtain of a large wooden M.
Like this one, all rolled up and ready to print as this:
Another thing that Otakou Press has in abundance are wonderful vintage image blocks, ranging from whimsical Victoriana through to cheesy ads from the 70s and 80s, before everything moved to polymer plate. Donald wondered if I might not use a couple, like this one:
He thought it might be a good way to illustrate the word lorgnette, which is the central premise of the poem, but I decided to keep everything typographical, to stay away from the ready-made images, and make people do what I suspect Les Murray wanted people to do: go and look up the word.
Now
So I’m beavering away, even on the weekends, because doing something every day is the only way I’ll get everything done. I’ve had lots of visitors, including a bunch of wonderful librarians who have been helping me tear down the paper. Part of my brief was to promote the program locally, so I’ve had interviews with the local paper, the university paper and there’s one coming up with the local tv station. I’ve talked to English students about working visually with poetry from a textual viewpoint, and to printmaking students about working with text as image and markmaking with moveable type.
I’m discovering how fast I can work if I only have one roller, and one colour, but that working fast gives me blisters. I printed 130 pages (I allow for bad printing!) in two and a half hours on Sunday to produce an under-layer for my Vincent O’Sullivan poem layout:
It’s a poem about rocks in a river forming trains like bridal veils, so I’ve printed large pine type that has a distinct wood grain in a green-grey, and will make the three stanzas of the poem into charcoal-silver clumps that will have cool watery type trails.
While that layer dries, I’m working on the Stephen Edgar poem, a fabulous piece about imagining words in the air around oneself. While my inner vision is an airy one in dull colours, what has emerged from the type and colour resources (and Donald’s yearning for colour) is quite different. It’s early days yet, but I’ve pulled from the poem the notion of sunset revealing disintegrating words, so I’m using sunset colours of pinky-red and orange and black…
This is hot off the press this afternoon, my first tentative pull in one colour to see if the composition works. I’ll be running this one through the press twice, like the O’Sullivan, which will cut into my time a bit. I can see the next two weeks being completely manic as I try to get everything printed in time for the folios to be collated by the last week. I’ve just finished talking to the most excellent university binder here about the folio design of black & white with a strip of overprinted proof inset into the front. Yum!
I have been blogging my Dunedin experiences, both printing and otherwise, at my personal blog, and there are more photos on my flickr page.
(BTW, If you’re interested in purchasing Prime, you can contact Donald by emailing donald[dot]kerr[at]otago[dot]ac[dot]nz. Because the press is not-for-profit, they retail the PIR produce at very affordable prices, and pump all the money back into the residency. This folio of seven posters will be only NZ$250 plus postage and packing (for the whole folio, not individual posters). We’ve already sold a third of the edition, so don’t delay if you want one.)
Cross-posted at Slow Making.
In 2009 I spent some time thinking about what I really wanted to do with letterpress. I’d printed two fine press volumes, the kind of books that I’d always wanted to make, but they’d taken me three years to achieve amidst all my work and family commitments, and that’s not very good business. Plus, I’d tried to do every part of the process myself: planning, negotiating, designing, setting, printing, binding, publicity, sales. And that’s just exhausting.I do intend to make more fine press books, but they’ll be smaller editions, and far less ambitious.
What I tend to do is work on other people’s ideas, and get them made. And I like to teach people how to do things for themselves, but again, running courses tends to take a lot of time, because I have to organise the course myself. (Why aren’t there agents for artists like there are for writers? I know there are galleries, but they just want to move the units, not get involved in the community.)
So I came up with the idea of offering a small residency to emerging artists I had worked with at the ANU Art School. The structure was already there: the Emerging Artists’ Support Scheme, which encourages members of the local community to donate residencies, funds, space in collections, exhibitions, whatever they feel they can do. At the end of the year, when the students graduate, the EASS Patrons (as they are termed) get first look at the Grad Show, and pick out the recipients of their largesse.
I thought I would buy some paper at one of the various paper sales (Neil Wallace and MES do good ones, usually twice a year) and offer the student/s (I’ll either choose one or two a year, depending upon that year’s talent pool) some time in my personal studio to make a broadside, which is basically a letterpress poster. In contemporary fine press tradition, a broadside is a beautiful typographical exercise in laying out poetry, and perhaps including a tasteful image or two (this site has some good examples); I’m all for that, and maybe some of my recipients will do things that way, but essentially I’m asking them to make a poster edition, and I’m leaving the brief very broad… one rule is that text needs to be in it, and the other rule is to have fun.
It’s quite fun, walking around the giant exhibition that the ANU School of Art becomes at graduation time, and thinking about who would respond to my opportunity. At first I thought that any student with a flair for design could be in the running — and I still think that, really — but this first year (2009/10), I thought that I’d make it easy on myself while I’m working out the arrangements, and chose two students with whom I’d worked in my Book Comp class, and who I knew had an interest in the process and could actually achieve an outcome without getting bored and wandering away…
As my first resident, Natalie Azzopardi, finishes her time with me, I think I’m very happy with my decision. Having someone playing with the equipment while I do other work in my studio is not particularly invasive, and I enjoy the chance to let them play without classtime constraints.
Another wonderful advantage for the recipients is that they can put the residency on their CVs, and if they want to travel, maybe others overseas will allow them time in their personal or community studios, since there are so few opportunities in Australia to access typography equipment. I’m going to provide each person who completes a broadside with a letter of recommendation, listing the skills that they have developed during the residency.
I’ve also decided to hold back the first ten prints of each edition, in the hope that after a few years I will have a set for exhibition, and a number of sets to offer as a mixed folio edition.
So, for some sort of record, I’m going to list here the recipients, as they come and go, and what they’ve made:
2010
Natalie Azzopardi, Photography & Digital Media student
GAME OVER series (four editions: two large, two small)
Produced February-May 2010
Peter McLean, Printmedia & Drawing student
TBA (residency in June or October)
Natalie Azzopardi is my first ANU EASS Ampersand Duck Broadside Residency recipient.
When I gave the prize to her, she hadn’t officially left the ANU School of Art; they have a strange system where you do three years of study, then you exhibit as a graduate, and then you find out if you are doing Honours, and then you do another year and then exhibit as a graduate again. It isn’t unusual to win an exhibition prize as a 3rd Year graduate, and then be still study when you exhibit as an emerging artist. Of course, most of the time Patrons are warned when someone may be getting into Honours, but that’s not a foolproof system…
Actually, I knew Natalie would do honours, because her work is excellent, but she’d just spent a semester doing letterpress with me in class, and I didn’t want to wait another year and have her go all rusty on me. So I snaffled her when I could. I thought she could make her broadside in the uni holidays and then get on with her year.
That was a good plan, but… she got very interested in the process, and one idea led to another, and before we knew it, four months of Tuesdays had flown by and she’d produced four posters out of the one allotment of paper. I bet her teachers are pleased that we’ve finished, because now she’s really got no excuse but to do her honours work, which has very little to do with letterpress (she’s a Photography student who studied Book as a complementary unit).
Here she is, back in Summer, starting on her Mario design, using grid paper to aid her set-up. The type tray is full of type ornaments not unlike these ones. After doing the Mario set-up, I found a box of dot ornaments, and she liked them so much that all the other prints restraint themselves to a dot matrix, so to speak.
I’m really happy with what she’s done. She’s learned a lot about type and presswork, and that if you plan ahead, you don’t have to print the same colour twice (or even three times, in one case!). But when the work is all intuitive and experimental, sometimes good things happen from the accidents of other things. Some of my favorite work in this project wasn’t able to be editioned, and we have a couple of copies each.
Like this page, where she has offset the ink by pressing one print against another to create a fantastic ghostly effect that works so well with the theme.
So the final editions reflect the planning she put into them. She started by thinking about Mario:
And this was a real learning curve, trying to decide how to make it a three-colour print. In the end it became a two-colour print, because we thought that the subtle patterning in the rest of his shape would be overwhelmed by the dots if his face & hands were printed in a solid colour, so we came up with the idea of embossing his skin.
There are 55 copies of this print, because we’d split the original paper ration into three smaller piles of 60 each, and she’d printed the first colour run of this and the next before deciding to play with the Space Invaders and thus dividing the ration even further!
And so then there is the Pacman print, of which there are 50 copies:
And then we get to the two Space Invader prints:
This one has 20 copies,
… and this one has 14!
The wood type was the last thing printed on all of them. Natalie knew what she wanted, but it was a matter of finding the perfect font and working out the colours. Originally we’d thought of printing all the text in the same spot on each poster, in one unifying colour, but once she looked at all the prints together, it was obvious that they needed individual treatment. Which meant three more colour runs! With letterpress it isn’t just a matter of changing a colour; you have to ink up the press, print, then clean off the press and then start again. It’s laborious, and takes patience and dedication, which Natalie has.
While they’re editioned, each of the prints is really an individual, as feeding the paper through the press is done by a human, not a mechanical process… there are slight variations of alignment which means that your print, signed by the artist and chopmarked with the Ampersand Duck mark, is really your own print, and not a unit in a mass-produced project.
So. These fabulous broadsides are available from my Duckshop (<== on the sidebar, to your left). Don’t miss out, they will hopefully all sell, and that may fund a part of Natalie’s next project, whatever that may be. I’m positive this won’t be her last printing experience!
Stay tuned for a very different broadside experience when Peter McLean makes his edition with me.
Ampersand Duck is proud to announce the release of a new artists’ book.
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.
this is a gap
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.
this is a gap
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 Printmaking at the National Art School in Sydney. 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 did the lithography editioning.
this is a gap
this is a gap
Available now for Aus$450 plus p&h. Email Ampersand Duck for more details.
All money from the book is being donated to Sarah Rice.
3 Chords and the Truth: Art Inspired by Music
31 March to 11 April 2010
ANCA Gallery, 1 Rosevear Place, Dickson ACT
Curated by Narelle Phillips, this is a group exhibition featuring myself,
Geoffrey Dunn (photography)
Nicci Haynes (printmaking)
Philippa Hofgartner (painting)
Andrew Mayo (photography)
Franki Sparke (printmaking)
Peter Stewart (glass)
Anne Warren (works on paper)
I made a selection of paper works using discarded sheet music, letterpress, and various fun things that I found along my trail. What follows are bad phone camera images that are placemarkers until I can get some better ones: I’ve just arranged to have some better ones taken while I’m up in Mackay!
This is called The Midnight Serenade. It’s not really wearable, it’s more a thought about how people treasure a song. Each bead is made from a line of sheet music, and the whole bracelet is the entire song. It is sitting on some bits of pianola roll, with the title of the song, inside an old cigarette case.
Another not-really-wearable piece, called Secret Thrill. Again, something about treasuring music, this time the secret love of a daggy song. It’s a wooden bangle covered with the sheet music of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, with lots of rhinestones that have been stuck on the inside of the bangle.
More on treasuring music. In fact, the whole suite of works are about music, nostalgia and holding something close to yourself. This one, using sheet music and origami, is called Humming. It sold on opening night.
A close-up of Humming.
This one is a collage work on paper. I was playing with an old hymn book that had lovely thin, fragile paper. I was making origami shapes from the paper, but it wasn’t feeling like anything special. Then I found myself becoming entranced with the yellowy amber-like quality of the copious amounts of decaying sticky-tape that had been used by a previous owner to hold the book and pages together. There was no page left under the tape, only this luminous transparent gold. So I made a piece using the tape. It’s a conservator’s nightmare, but it’s a beautiful golden piece. I called it Stain.
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A close-up of Stain.
This is the end of a pianola roll, collaged with text. I called it Blue. The holes in the roll when looked at from the side looked like electronic pulses, and as I pondered over them I found myself humming ‘Blue Monday’ by New Order. When I thought about the words, they seemed very straightforward and simple. I looked through my cut-up collection of books for the right paper colour (it had to be a very particular aged brown) and found it in an old cheesy edition of Little Women. I found all the words I needed in just two chapters of LW.
A close-up of Blue, with text.
I made a stack of posters to advertise the show, using wood type on newsprint and sheet music. Finally, I printed on the backs of the two books of sheet music I’d taken apart for the posters. I thought I’d make them a bit special for the show, so i collaged them. This one is called Vocal Chords
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A close-up of Vocal Chords.
And this one is called Reflex.
A close-up of Reflex. The song lyrics on the right are the ‘rap’ from Michael Jackson’s Thriller. I can’t believe they made Vincent Price say y’awl’s neighbourhood!
All the works are for sale through the ANCA Gallery until the show finishes.
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.
BUY NOW AT THE DUCKSHOP
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.
Playing with Anna’s Ghosts
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
I was invited to participate in the fabulous-looking Two Fires Festival of Art & Activism at Braidwood, NSW on the weekend of 27-29 March ‘09.
According to their website,
The Two Fires Festival is a celebration of poet and activist Judith Wright’s impressive double legacy, and an opportunity to explore the ongoing relevance of that legacy in today’s world. It aims to stoke the two fires of arts & activism. This year’s festival will be taking up the challenge of Coming Together.
Coming together with me on our Small Publishers’ Panel were Stephen Mathew of Ginninderra Press, Rob Riel of Picaro Press and Wagtail Books, and Alice Gage of Ampersand Magazine. We were wrangled by Phil Day of Finlay Lloyd Press.
Account written the day after:
Speaking on the panel was fun. Phil took his wrangling seriously, and even though armed with a formidable list of intelligent questions, allowed himself to sacrifice some of them and let us ramble on — and then pulled us back to the Important Issues. It was a good mix of panelists.
As I said on my personal blog, I felt a bit like I was in one of those Sesame Street clips that sing one of these things is not like the others. All the others were digital or off-set print publishers, fraught with commercial pressures, hell-bent upon getting new writing out there, everywhere, in an attractive and affordable manner. I, on the other hand, put out small editions, hand-crafted, with a vague eye to making money (something I have to address very soon) but focusing more on the object than the accessibility. However, the more we talked, the more we had in common. For example, Rob Riel has a similar interest to mine, of looking at Australia’s poetic history, and rifling through the dross to find gems to republish. He now has a series of poetry reprints called Art Box, reproducing what he considers to be good out-of-print volumes. Is he creating a canon? I hope so, to some extent. I don’t think Australia has one for poetry apart from Lawson-Paterson-Gilmore-insert names here-big gap-Wright-Murray
We talked a wee bit about design, a lot about accessibility, more about the Future of The Book (we didn’t really get anywhere on that point, of course: the oral poets, who insisted that here is now and we don’t need to put stuff on paper ended up selling books of their work later in the day), had some healthy interjections and questions from the audience, and I got to poke Phil with a stick a little bit, a beloved hobby of mine for years now because he takes it so well (we used to go to art school at the same time).
I also got to spend some time in the Braidwood Book and Print Room, a not-to-be-missed experience for anyone who loves eclectic books, fab prints and works on paper, and a gorgeous setting. This is a bookshop that doesn’t care that it lives in a small country town; it has a distinctly European sensibility and doesn’t stock anything you’d expect to find. It’s very easy to find: as you’re travelling through the Braidwood town centre on the way to the coast/Batemans Bay, you turn left onto the highway, and not far along on your right is a blue house and a sign saying ‘bookshop’. You are there. Please do go there, even if only via the website. [POSTSCRIPT = no longer there, sadly. Another good idea bites the dust...]
The Pillowbooks
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. PURCHASE FROM DUCKSHOP NOW!
[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.
Time Limit Applies
Artist’s book (ongoing, from 2005).
ACT Government parking vouchers in a yellow manilla Japanese binding and slipcase, c. 120 x 60 x 10mm. Canberra: Ampersand Duck, first copy in 2005. Limited edition of 10.
This playful little book is an ongoing exploration of the nature of inbuilt obsolescence. Parking vouchers are printed to exist in the moment, deliberately fading to void the transaction. Time Limit Applies allows the reader to witness the disintegration of the various components of the text/image into a white void. Consequently it should be viewed as a work in progress – or rather, retrogress.
 The first TLA binding, 2005
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