Manly Artists Book Award

The Future of an Illusion detail 

The Future of an Illusion, a collaborative book I made with Jack Oudyn in 2016
has been selected for the Manly Artist Book Award
which takes place at the Manly Library in Sydney from 30th March to 2nd April
followed  by a travelling exhibition of the books that have been acquired.

A post I wrote about the making and meaning of this book can be found here
and Jack also wrote about this book on his blog here.

The judges for this year's award are Dr Michael Hedger, Director of Manly Art Gallery and Museum and Ben Rak an artist and independent curator.

Between the Sheets

Between the Sheets: Artists' Books Exhibition 2017 

will be presented by Gallery East in conjunction with Gallery Central in Perth, Western Australia from 18 March to the 8 April 2017.

Two of my books will be on exhibition.   

The Legacy of Silence  (2016)

I wrote a post about this book on my blog in August 2016 here.

and The Sunken Boat (2016) 

This piece is a reworking of a book sculpture called Rimbaud's Drunken Boat which had been on exhibition in France and was suitable for that exhibition with it's French themed poetry connection.

For this exhibition I reworked the etching on the perspex pages (moving currents, waves, water, seaweed, fish, debris) making it more dense and filled the gaps on each page with crosses referencing lives lost at sea - a reflection on refugees who have lost their lives in Australian waters. 

The Legacy of Absence and Silence

The Legacy of Absence and Silence 

explores the search for identity and belonging, the desire to be part of a bigger shared history and cultural background.  Many Australians whose forbears settled here from the early days of settlement throughout the 19th century share this absence of knowledge and this void.

These forbears never spoke of their families and their past lives in their native land.  Many Europeans anglicized their names and rejected their native languages.  Few stories, if any, were passed down, yet our identity is inextricably linked to these forbears through DNA.

When I started making this piece I  first made a traditional book structure with a spine which I called 

The Legacy of Silence.

 I worked on pages using predominantly drawing, some printmaking and others using photo transfers.

This page was about gold mining, so a strip of real gold leaf was added.

The book works well but I always like an interesting sculptural presentation and I had in mind that I would enter this piece in the Libris awards, So I kept this book as a more traditional version and started again designing a large sculptural structure.

I needed to make a few changes and the printmaking pages were redone as white marks, drawing and a photo transfer on black paper.

I had to make a number of each of the pages as all the work had to be original artwork which could then be folded into long concertinas.  I left the text off these pages and settled for a freestanding text page which folds into a concertina and sits within the front cover of the finished book.

The multiple concertinas were sewn together to form a more complex structure which still folds down flat into the book covers.  It ended up being really large, measuring about 75 x 15 cm. closed. 

The structure of the book enhances the meaning.  The viewer can peer into the darkness of the front pages trying to glean details and then look down into the white pages where a few known facts are revealed, but glimpses only of these images can be seen, never the full story.

The Legacy of Absence and Silence has been selected for exhibition in the Libris Awards at Artspace Mackay from 26th August to 16th October 2016. 

Delires de Livres

I am very pleased to have been invited to participate in Delires de Livres once again.  

I have been an exhibitor a number of times when the exhibition was held in the wonderful old Collegiale St Andre in Chartres in France.  However the organisers were no longer able to exhibit in this location.  Fortunately they were able to secure another venue  - the new Cultural centre in Rambouillet which is on the outskirts of Paris.  The only down side was that the number of participants had to be reduced from about 175 to about 65, so a much smaller exhibition this time.

It was no surprise that the book of mine that was selected is Rimbaud's Drunken Boat and is based on a French poem of that name - Le Bateau Ivre by Arthur Rimbaud.  The book is made of triangles of perspex and is sewn together in such a way that it is flexible and can be displayed in a number of ways which can suggest the movement of the sea or the damaged boat.  

Each perspex panel contains an etching which I made in response to a line of the poem and subsequently coloured with aquamarine acrylic.   The book covers are of aquamarine perspex.

 

Delires de Livres 2016 will be on exhibition at La Lanterne in Rambouillet, France from 1st April to 21st May 2016. 

Another showing of 4 x 4

Following on from an exhibition in the Cairns Regional Gallery earlier in the year, a display of sculptural books by 4 South East Qld and 4 Far North Qld artists has been installed in the Brisbane Square Library, George Street, Brisbane.

The SEQ artists are Fiona Dempster, Susan Bowers, Adele Outteridge and myself, and the FNQ artists are Rose Rigley, Claudine Marzik, Barbara Dover and Rosie Miller.

I chose to make two poetic works - interpretations of Rimbaud's Drunken Boat and Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil as they are always good to represent sculpturally, and they also turned out to be a suitable choice for the library.  
My third piece is called Into the Void. 

The exhibition continues from 1 July to 30 September.

The 'abbe' Artists Book Conference will also take place in Brisbane from the 16th - 18th July.  There will be an associated Artists Book Fair on the Friday afternoon and Saturday.  Details can be found here 

An outing in London

I was contacted by one of the Curators of DIY Cultures 2015, a festival of talks, exhibitions, film and animation with stalls selling zines and artists books to be held at Rich Mix in London on 24th May.  They were interested in obtaining a copy of my book Unchartered Democracy for a concurrent exhibition of artists books called 

DIY Justice.

This exhibition will be held in the Cafe Gallery at Rich Mix Cinema and Arts Centre at Bethnal Green from 24 May to 12 June.  

I am really pleased to be participating but wish I could instantly time travel to London to attend - sounds really great.

Anzac Day 2015

I was thrilled to have the opportunity to participate once again this year in the exhibition
 Delires de Livres in Chartres in France.
The theme for the 2015 exhibition was 'How about we go........' and I chose to send a copy of my book Back to the Front, which fitted the theme perfectly -
How about we go back in time to the Western Front.

By chance, this exhibition in France is opening tomorrow on our Anzac Day.  Although probably meaningless for many of the French (though certainly not those wonderful people in Villers-Bretonneux who observe and commemorate our Anzac Day every year after the liberation of their town by the Australians on 25th April 1918), it could not have been more appropriate for me.
The exhibition will continue from 25th April to 17th May.

The exhibition venue is the beautiful old Collegiale Saint Andre in Chartres, not far from the magnificent Chartres Cathedral.

I was interviewed recently for a video about Anzac Day on the occasion of the opening
of the Of War and Peace Exhibition at the Caloundra Regional Gallery,
along with the other three participating book artists Fiona Dempster, Barry Smith and Susan Bowers. 
This video was shot by Ellen Ebsary and she has edited it into a beautiful 3 minute film and posted it  onto the ABC Open website.
You can see it here

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.

Into the Void

Into the Void (at the space between day and night) is a new book I've made this year.  The structure is one I've used before as a circular shape, but I wanted this one to sit like a fan.  The front depicts day and shows parts of figures painted in black ink disappearing up into the top of the book coloured an orangey sunset colour and painted in gouache.

The book is wider at the base and double sided, the back being the night and showing the outlines of figures drifting around in the space.

The cover is of faux black and white leather with a paper insert and leather spine.

This is one of my books that will be on display at the Cairns Regional Gallery in 4 x 4, featuring three sculptural books each by four FNQ artists and four SEQ artists organised by Rose Rigley and Fiona Dempster.  They will then be displayed in Brisbane in the middle of the year.

The One Pound Pom

One of the first tasks of the New Year has been to finish off  two books that had been made last year but were sitting with some details unfinished.  One of these was the book I made for the Personal Histories Exhibition of 100 books organised by Robyn Foster and which will take place from the 29th March to 10 May at the Redland Art Gallery in Cleveland.

I wanted to delve into the family history and make a book about my husband's ancestor, Timothy Dempsey, who was transported to Australia in 1821 after being found in possession of a forged one pound note, which I guess was a fortune in those days.   Timothy couldn't read or write, so obviously he wasn't the forger, and was no doubt a young man leading a miserable life in Wiltshire in England (though he was originally from Cork in Ireland). 

Despite all the hardships he would have faced being on a prison hulk in Portsmouth for many months and then surviving the trip to Australia on a convict ship, overall it turned out he was quite lucky.  He was sent to the Bathurst region to work on the farm of Henry Fulton and was given a Ticket of Leave after seven years which allowed him to move around the district freely and to work.  After another seven years he received his Certificate of Freedom.  He was granted land, married and had a large family and after his death was buried in the biggest most impressive vault in the local cemetery at Blayney.  Not bad for someone who would have continued a poverty stricken miserable life in England.

How to tell this story visually?  The most intriguing idea for me was to somehow make a reference to the convict ship and the journey.

I have always liked the Kurilpa pedestrian bridge over the Brisbane river near the Gallery precinct, which is suggestive of a boat with all its masts and rigging and  this inspired me to think of adapting this idea into a book structure using concertina folds, satay sticks and linen thread.
I experimented with lots of random masts along the middle and sides of concertina folds, but was not happy with the result and I decided it needed simplifying.

On Arches paper I printed three important historical documents - Timothy's trial at the Wiltshire Assizes, his Ticket of Leave and his Certificate of Freedom.  To these I added rubber stamps of dates, the verdict and sentence along with details of his time on the prison hulk and convict ship.  Crosses for his signature were completed with wax seals.  I joined the docments and folded them into a concertina structure.


I inserted masts of satay sticks into the three centre mountain folds.  These were sewn in with linen thread and tied down with rigging.  The stitches formed a nice pattern like the steps of the ladders up to the sails. The trial document contained a reproduction of the one pound note in question, and this was also printed and used for the main middle sail, along with a painted Union Jack for the back sail.

I cut some copper shim and made some convict tokens as an approximation of the tokens the convicts often made from pennies and engraved roughly themselves (or they had finer ones made by one of the forger/engravers in prison with them).  I had a book from the library with photos of many of these surviving tokens (now in collections) and I was able to engrave authentic sentiments on the copper.

The final step was to roughly draw in ink and brush a simple sketch of  the convict ship and its rigging, and I liked the contrast between this crude drawing and the finely, well crafted handwriting of the documents, like the contrast between the convicts and officialdom. 

I made a folder/box for the structure to sit in, complete with ribbon and wax seal and I thought the book was finished.

Then recently I thought of how to make a cover for the book by sewing the middle valley fold onto the spine of a book cover.  But what sort of cover would you have on a convict ship?  I opted for some very rough canvas, hand-stitched and roughly cut and made two covers, but it frayed so much I had to edge it with the sewing machine.  I inserted the book board inside the covers and stitched them to a leather spine.  The last step was to stitch the middle of the book structure onto the leather spine.