Manly Artists Book Award

'Chance' is a collaborative dos-a-dos book made last year by Jack Oudyn and myself. There is a long blog post about it here.  We entered this book in the Manly Library Artists Book Award 2015 and it was selected for inclusion.  

 It will be on exhibition at the Manly Library, Market Place, Manly, Sydney, NSW from 24 March to the 12 April 2015.

The book has been selected for acquisition by the Manly Library for their Artists Book Collection. 

An Al-Mutanabbi Street Event in Brisbane

The 5 March 2015 marks the eighth anniversary of the bombing of Al-Mutanabbi Street,

the street of booksellers and book culture in Baghdad since the eighth century.

30 people were killed, 100 wounded and countless numbers of books destroyed or burned.

This year we can also remember the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris and the recent burning and destruction of books in Mosul in Iraq.

Events and readings have been scheduled in different countries to remember this event by the Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here members.

This year an event will take place at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, organised by artist Peter Annand who also participated in the artists books and printmaking sections of the Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here project.

A Soiree, including recitation of Arabic texts, music and readings from the Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here anthology will take place at 5 pm on 17th March in the UQ Library Conference Room. 

An installation of boats made from bookmarks and called Passages, relating to the Australian experience of refugees, has been installed today in the foyer area of the University of Queensland Library.  These books have been made by a number of participating artists, and there will be workshops in the Library on Sunday 8 March  and Friday 20 March  from 2 - 5 pm, where anyone interested can make a boat that will be added to the installation.

My boat, made from a combination of my own handmade ink bookmarks and found library bookmarks is contained in a book and opens out to display.

David Symons and Peter Annand did a great job hanging my book in the installation and I decided to call it 'The Magic Carpet'.

4 by 4 at Cairns Regional Gallery

Rimbaud's Drunken Boat

A display of twenty four sculptural artists books are being installed at Cairns Regional Gallery today and will continue until 29th March.  The four Far North Qld artists are Rose Rigley, Claudine Marzik, Rosie Miller and Barbra Dover and the four South East Qld artists are Fiona Dempster, Susan Bowers, Adele Outteridge and myself.  Each artist has contributed three books.

The books will then be displayed in the middle of the year in Brisbane.

My three books include Rimbaud's Drunken Boat, a flexible book made of etched perspex and acrylic which can be adjusted to sit asymmetrically, suggesting the chaotic movement of the sea.  The etchings on each page were made as a response to random lines of the poem Le Bateau Ivre  by Arthur Rimbaud, and were then coloured with acrylic.

The Flowers of Evil

The Flowers of Evil is another book inspired by French poetry - Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire.  In this sculptural interpretation of the poem the pages are of linocuts and expressively written text from the poem appears on the book cover and the book box.

Into the Void

My third book is Into the Void which I've already posted about here.