From My Collection - 'Edge' by Jack Oudyn

                                                                            

One of the most beautiful books in my collection is Edge, an Artists Proof by Jack Oudyn.

The book is A5 size and contains 6 double sided leaves. It is bound along the outside edge of the cover in Japanese style. The handmade cover paper is made from grasses and plant fibre of the type that would be found in nature.

Jack went on a trip to Kati Thanda (Lake Eyre) in 2019 when the lake was in flood with historically high levels of water. He took a flight over the lake to see the scale of it and also to view it from above.  This enabled him to create his personal impression in these wondrous images created with his own homemade mangrove and pomegranate inks, acrylic paint, coloured pencils, pastels, 

chinagraph pencils and found maps.

Jack called the book 'Edge' as a reference to the edge of the boggy and shallow shoreline which it is impossible to approach on land.  He varies the size of the dark paint on the outer edges of the pages to indicate the continually changing edges of the lake.

The pages of the book are double sided and Jack has made tabs on each spread that can be lifted from the surface image to show underlying maps of the area.  He has included a little card lifter inside the front cover to facilitate this.

I find these colours and images of nature and of our country incredibly beautiful and contemplative.  I can imagine every spread as a framed painting that would give enormous pleasure.

The interesting and amazing thing that struck me was that in his portrayal of our wonderful landscape from his aerial view of his experience and his mapping of the land, one is struck by certain aspects of Australian indigenous art. 

In a comment on his blog he says

When you are in a little plane you see our indigenous art in nature.  

They would never have seen it from the air so how did they visualise their landscape?

Yes it is a wonder of our landscape - so glad I had the chance to experience it.

 You can view Jack's blog post on this book and his comment here

 

A Much Loved Book

                                                                          

When an old friend of mine, Helen Bryant, handed me this book box containing an artists book

 a few years ago, it was obvious it had been well handled and much loved.  

Helen said she had bought it from an exhibition at the Doggett Street Gallery in Brisbane in 1994.

 

 It had been one of her favourite possessions, and she wanted me to have it to enjoy.

 She said her family would have no appreciation or understanding of it.  

Helen also returned to me two early books of mine she had bought back in the mid 1990's.  

She was an art teacher with little time to do her own artwork 

and liked to support artists by buying their work. 

Helen B died soon after that day after a long battle with breast cancer.

It is a lovely reminder of her to have one of her little treasures. 

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the box contained an artists book 

called Containers made by a friend of mine, Jack Oudyn, back in 1993-4, before I knew him.

 

The book measures 15 x 8 cm. has a Japanese binding, and 25 double pages.

Jack has used a combination of photography, collage and drawing, techniques

 often seen in his artwork.  Some of the pages

 have lift up flaps cut into the photographs to expose underlying text or images.

Here are some of my favourite pages from the book.

                                                                                   

                                                                                                                                                                    

                                                                                               

    Jack likes to play with words and this book contains a number of examples.

Couplings and Stackings

Multiples and Twins

Well Stacked and Topless

The book juxtaposes aerial views of freestanding houses, backyards and gardens, with

stacks of shipping containers.  Jack made this book about 25 years ago but it seems so 

contemporary and very relevant to the present times where inner city suburbs are

 being bulldozed and tall buildings of small apartments are filling the space.

Many of them are so ugly and the apartments so small, it would actually feel like 

living in one of these stacked shipping containers.

                                                                    The sky's the limit

                                                                           Con  tainer

                                                                                    formity

Hidden tiles and Tile (Hidden)  (ITEL)

                                                                                               

                                                                                                                                                                  

                                                                                                                                           

Well we all know the priorities of the developers and the City Councillors who

always seem to cave in and allow the developers to break a few rules and add

another floor or two above the established height limit, previously enforced,

thus maximising profits for both parties.

I plan to post about one of Jack's more recent books in my possession in the near future.

                                                                                                      

Playtime

My friend Jack Oudyn had prepared a number of pages for a book using lots of different methods like painting, dipping in wax, carbon paper, creating folded patterns etc.   He passed on to me a little pile of paper offcuts and suggested I might like to make a haptic or tactile book, meaning a book which communicates through touching as non-verbal communication.

This sounded like a fun thing to play around with but it wasn't as easy as it sounds, especially the idea of communicating through touch.

I kept the biggest and most beautiful page Jack had prepared for the cover. 

I tried to think of things I could do to the pages to make someone looking at the pages want to touch them and interact with them.

There was a piece of pianola roll paper painted black - well that is good to touch and it actually does communicate music.  I had a starting point and a way to move forward.

So I folded paper that could be unfolded, inserted slips, punched smooth holes in pages, rough holes in pages, made some cutouts, roughly scored a thick-waxed page, folded another long page to remind me of the ubiquitous masks we been wearing and seeing everywhere.

I scratched thick wax off the thick surface of another black page and pushed the removed strands of wax back into the page so it looked like a kind of raised text

and in the middle fold I inserted a folded page which needed to be unfolded twice and attached four circular folded pages of varying sizes

which then were also able to be unfolded to create 3D structures.

The second half of the book repeats the same pages going backwards.

So thank you Jack for that little exercise.  It was a fun activity and I may start playing around with some other bookie things.

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.

Slim Chance

Last year I was very fortunate to work on a collaborative book with Jack Oudyn called Chance.  We really enjoyed working on that project and we'd both found the working method of the collaboration quite exciting.   We decided to use the same method and follow it up with another book related to 'Chance' this year.  We had been hoping to have it finished for the SLQ Book Fair in late June, but unfortunately I wasn't able to finish my pages in time due to the death of my mother.

Jack and I had been talking about the plight of refugees no longer being resettled in Australia and facing very uncertain futures.  We found this an interesting 'chance' topic and decided to use the same Kraft brown paper for the pages and the same Kraft card cover in a dos-a-dos format. Once again we exchanged alternate lines of text by email and  both responded with a drawing.  We agreed to use fresh turmeric, gesso, gouache, pencil.

Jack had used fresh turmeric in his work previously and suggested that we try using it and making a book which had an exotic spicy odour.   We found the pages did have a nice smell when they were finished, but even after keeping them in a sealed plastic bag, after a week or so the odour disappeared.  However the fresh turmeric was interesting to use as an art material and Jack used it very successfully in his work.  This is my favourite page of his, one I find powerful and beautiful.

A choice of freedom or death.  Jack Oudyn 

I experimented with turmeric but used less in the end as I wanted the blue of the sea to be predominant in my pages.   I started with the chance marks that resulted from a chopstick dipped in gesso and some of them looked a bit like jellyfish.  I had hoped they'd give some idea of movement through the water. One of my pages was inspired by a shot in the intro to the tv show The Vikings.

 A risky journey in a leaky boat.  Helen Malone

A choice of freedom or death.  Helen Malone

Jack produced some wonderful restrained drawings and I am so impressed with the way he was able to abstract the theme.  We included two lines from the second verse of our national anthem which say  For those who've come across the seas

We've boundless plains to share.

We've boundless plains to share.  Jack Oudyn

For those who've come across the seas.  Helen Malone

On each of our pages, there are a couple of words that have been translated into one of  a number of different languages.

 A land of hope on the horizon.  Jack Oudyn

For the cover, Jack made little embossings of a boat to which we added colour and he also found some reflective material to use for the cross.
Last time we made only one original of Chance which was acquired by the Manly Library in Sydney, however this time we thought ahead and made four originals, and I think two of them will remain in our own collections.
  

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.