Family Secrets

Family Secrets, begun in early 2014, has been sitting almost finished on my desk for most of last year and I recently decided to do the small amount of work required to finish it off.  I had originally thought I would make it for Robyn Foster's exhibition Personal Histories, but later changed my mind when I decided to make The One Pound Pom.

I'd made a Victorian Puzzle purse structure for my Christmas card in 2013, and was inspired to use this structure in another way.  I liked the way that even when you opened out the first folds, there was a second closure to be unfolded and it seemed very secretive.

I cut very large sheets of Arches paper and stained them with a mixture of tea and walnut ink to give them a very foxed aged appearance.  I made four puzzle purses and mounted them onto four pieces of heavy card covered with brown Canson paper.

These were then mounted onto a long aged and daggy piece of leather whose three edges I had folded and glued. The four segments then folded inward onto each other 

The fourth edge was the natural edge of the skin and had a pleasing shape which ended up on the front of the folded structure and was tied with a thin strip of pink leather, looking like something I could imagine having in a drawer that did contain letters or family secrets.  This was where I got to when the project was abandoned last year.

 I needed to make some little secrets to go into the puzzle purses, so I decided to make a small folded booklet for each.  I searched the internet for fonts that were attractive visually but difficult to read.  I envisaged something thin and tall.  I found just the thing I was looking for with a font called 'Disclaimer'.  I searched the family history and printed out a couple of facts that the family would have tried to keep secret in days gone by.

The book can be displayed with just one purse opened or can look quite stunning when displayed with them all opened with their booklets - and yes the secrets can be deciphered.

 

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.

The Book is Out!

 

Wow, it's finally happened after all those years of research on my part and writing on my husband Ross Davies part, that his new book Three Brilliant Careers. Nell Malone, Miles Franklin, Kath Ussher has been published by Boolarong Press in Brisbane and is now available.

I share the same name with my great aunt Nell, we are both Helen Frances Malone, and what a role model she would have been when I was young.  Unfortunately I discovered her story only about five years ago, and why my father gave me her name.  What an inspiring and great story it is.


The blurb on the back of the book says

Three Brilliant Careers reveals the previously untold story of celebrated author Miles Franklin and two lifelong Australian friends, Nell Malone and Kath Ussher, who met in Chicago in 1914 and reunited a year later in war torn London.
Despite facing enormous risks, the women subsequently travelled to the Balkans with the Scottish Women's Hospitals and served in frontline medical units attached to the French and Serbian Armies.

After the war, Miles settled in London, Kath in Hollywood and Nell in Paris, but maintained their friendship through regular correspondence.  All three achieved distinction in their chosen fields, although not without encountering significant obstacles in their path.
Bridging four decades across several continents, Three Brilliant Careers follows the remarkable lives of the friends, and explores their crossed destinies to tell an inspirational story of Australia's early feminists.


My son Tristan Davies has made a video book trailer which has been uploaded
to You Tube.



Back to the Front

Well it is back to the front again with the completion of this artists book that I started in 2014.  I made a bookbinding version of this book with text called Si Vis Pacem which has been exhibited twice and I wanted to make a more visual book on the subject as well.

I ended up making four copies of this book, and with the three bookbinding type books, it amounted to a lot of drawing of white crosses.  I almost felt like I'd drawn enough crosses to cover the number of dead on the Western front.

  

Like the first book, the idea behind the book is that of time travel, back to the Western Front in France.  Photos of real battlefields I had taken in France were transformed by digital manipulation into the dark deathly landscapes of the war.  Drawings of crosses as symbols of the dead were added in white charcoal for the viewer to reflect on the price that had to be paid for peace.  Like the first book, I collaged a leather landscape to the cover with white foil tooling of crosses.

Each of the four books has a designated exhibition to go to this year, and the first one has been sent off to Western Australia and will be exhibited in 'Between the Sheets' at the Central Gallery, Central Institute of Technology, 12 Aberdeen Street, Perth WA from the 6th March to 2nd April 2015.
Other books are going to Caloundra Regional Gallery for "Of War and Peace, Anzac Centenary Commemoration Exhibition from 25th March to 10th May, Personal Histories Exhibition at Redland Art Gallery, Cleveland from 29th March to 10th May, and the fourth one will be going to France.

It was great to get work that had been hanging over from 2014 finished and I've made a great start to 2015 with a number of pieces for other exhibitions coming up this year - more soon! 

Tis the Season to be Merry

Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas

and the Happiest of New Years.

May there be lots of books to show and talk about!

The Same but Different

Minus Plus Equal (- + =) is a collaborative project I've just finished working on with Jack Oudyn, who has also posted about this collaboration on his blog. 

Like our previous collaborative book Chance, this collaboration was inspired by a talk given at the State Library of Queensland earlier in the year, by two visiting German book artists, Ulrike Stoltz and Uta Schneider, who work collaboratively as USUS.

We began by individually making ten abstract linocut blocks, each measuring 7 x 7 cm. and mounted them on single wooden blocks that Jack had very kindly prepared in advance.

We each printed off our ten small prints.  We met and alternately chose one of the prints until we had put them together into a compilation of 12 squares.

Many experiments ensued as we tried to find the best way to print the compilation.  Inking them and lining them up to print individually was tedious and difficult, so Jack mounted the twelve blocks together on a board.  Neither of us has a press and we are both interested in simple hand-made methods of production.  The compilation block was printed by hand using wooden spoons.  The first five prints were in black ink on white paper.

The second five were printed in white ink on black paper.

We marvelled at the differences and optical illusions of the black and white combinations and the positive and negative space.

The title "- + =" came from the progress of the work, subtracting from the block to add to the alternative colour, and how although both prints and paper sizes are equal, when they're side by side they do not appear to be so.

They were then folded and mounted into both black and white folders I had made and linocut prints of the title Jack had prepared were glued on to each folder.

The final task was to construct Perspex boxes to house each pair of black and white prints in our edition of five.

A Book Trailer

A few weeks ago my younger son, Tristan Davies, made a video for Ross's book Middle-Aged Men in Lycra.  Tristan does this for a living.

All involved enjoyed participating and making the video and I got to drive the car from which Tristan filmed the men in action.

A great Christmas present if you've got a cyclist in the family, and Ross has had much positive feedback from women readers who have loved the unfolding story of the men's past and present lives, and the quality of his writing.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jVVpc_NWWw