The gift of Jill

I've just got home from one of those ceremonies that gives thanks for a person's life after they've died. Not a funeral, she was cremated last week, not a memorial, but a real giving of thanks that that person was in our lives. She wasn't in my life much, but even the small amount I've experienced, and the peripheral encounters along my way with her friends and especially her artwork, will resonate with me for the rest of my life.

The biggest point of personal resonance is that she was my age, give or take a few months. 46 is not a good innings. She died of cancer, a horrible way to go, but apparently she never complained. It wasn't her style: everyone agreed today that she lived every bit of what she had well, which is a good thing to be able to say.

Jill Wolf made a conscious choice to follow the heart at every fork in the road. I knew her briefly at art school, where I was starting as she was finishing in the Graphic Investigations Workshop (headed by Petr Herel). My main point of connection is with the work she made and left in the GIW archive that is held by the ANU Library Special Collections unit. At least once a year I take my students to see artists' books from the archive, pulling out works that I think will interest them or that fit the themes I've wanted to address, and without fail, Jill's work is on my list.

Here is my latest batch of students, looking at that session's selection of GIW books. In the foreground on the right is Jill's Excerpts from the Book of Memory. It is large and unbound, in actuality a pile of drawings on tissue paper housed in a (found?) cover of rope-edged canvas to resemble a loose codex. The fact that it isn't bound doesn't make it less of a book, and in GIW many books were deliberately unbound (as are most of Petr Herel's own artist's books). The first page always fools the reader; it looks like nothing in particular -- just a faded photocopy-transfer image -- until they actually pick it up to turn the sheet, and the text, hand-written in white pencil on the white tissue, suddenly appears... and then disappears again when the sheet is turned over and laid down, so you really have to hold it to engage with it.

All the marks in the book, image and text, do this movement of focusing in and out, appearing and disappearing, performing a dance of trace and erasure as the tissue layers are moved. There is grey pencil, white pencil, gesso, image transfers, and various other media. The effect is subtle and moving, both physically and emotionally. Unfortunately I don't have any page photos, only the cover:

  

She travelled to Bosnia in the 1990s right in the midst of their troubles, and this piece, made in her graduation year, (along with a number of paintings, drawings and smaller books) reflects her feelings and observations about what she saw, heard and learned there. She had a very distinct aesthetic (quite Cy Twombly-inspired) and a personal iconography that she used in her formal artworks, her less formal pieces (usually presents for people) and in her daily interactions with the world, all of which blur together to make an artistic lived life.

 

 

This square cross (sent to me in the mail last year as packaging for a print) was included in much of her work, and I'll never be able to see one again without thinking of her. Lately she'd been focusing on hearts (especially knitted). Today at the service, many of these symbols, in the form of drawings, knitted works, ceramics and scraps of letters and cards, were arranged on a table. In her hospice room, when I visited her late last year with some other classmates, she had a beautifully-arranged gallery of artwork and objects, positioned deliberately to bring her pleasure wherever she turned her eyes from her bed.

Jillie was fun-loving, food-loving, music-loving, speed-loving (there were many chuckles in the room today as friends recalled her love of doing hand-brake skids on country dirt roads, and how she drove her electric wheelchair so fast around Lake Burley Griffin that her friends started wearing jogging shoes or bringing their bikes for their 'walks') and only ever worked a job long enough to make enough money to travel. She traveled a lot. She studied many things, including creative writing. At art school she changed her surname from Smith to Wolf (inspired by our feisty Technical Officer whom we were only allowed to call Wolf), and I was thinking today that it was her way of making a marriage-like commitment to art and life.

Her brother and sister and friends spoke today about what a fantastic person she was, at the same time managing to let us know lovingly that she wasn't perfect, because really, who is? But it was her mother's speech that really went to my heart. Of course she spoke about their love for Jill, how funny and clever and loving Jill herself was, but she also talked about the choices Jill had made, how impetuous and rash they could be, how worrying it was for her parents that she never seemed to settle down and that some of the situations she put herself in were dangerous (like Bosnia) -- but that her enthusiasm for life and her wonderful, articulate feedback (in the form of letters, postcards, phone-calls etc) about the places she'd been and the things that she'd seen made all the worry worthwhile. And that whenever Jill needed to move home, as she did a few times, she was an absolute pleasure to have around because she was just so engaged with everything, so grateful to be alive.When she became so ill, no-one had any doubts about giving her the care she needed.

I have had occasion to think over the last year or so about the pathways that we expect for ourselves and our children. I don't know about you, but many of my family members, both blood and by marriage, seem to expect the Straight Line: school, university, a good job, a relationship and children. Any step sideways from this is expected to be temporary: a Gap Year, a Breakdown, a Grieving Period, always defined, always something to Come Back From. These expectations are hard to fight and it's easy to capitulate, to earn that feeling of approval for Getting Back on Track. For many, the only way to break away or fight the pressure is to give yourself less responsibility, like taking drugs or harming yourself so that you can't function within the bounds of Normality.

Jill's parents gave her a huge gift: the freedom to make her own choices, even if they didn't feel comfortable with them. Of course, they are fortunate that she didn't have a drug addiction or a similar self-harming habit; there are plenty of points at which they could, or probably did try to intervene, but Jill seemed to have a cheerful determination to just do her thing at her own pace, and the support structure of good family and friends certainly helped to give her the confidence to be herself. She would have been the most marvellous old lady.

It was a wonderful morning. Laughs, stories and songs. We all quietly sobbed through this one (damn, Youtube not working, but here's the link). It's George Harrison's All things must pass.

It finished with everyone trying hard to choke out 'All you need is love' together. The best bit about The Beatles is that even if the lump in your throat is making the verses hard to sing, there's never any problem with the choruses.

And then I went home, and hugged my beautiful son, over and over until he told me I was weird. Why yes, I hope I am. I hope I can let myself let him be free in his own way.

Goodbye Jill, you're in my book of memories, and I'm going to try to live, or to keep living with a bit of your free spirit to inspire me.

art attacks

I've been trying to write a blogpost since Saturday, but my weekend and early week just keep going and going faster and faster until here I am, and it's lunchtime on Wednesday. My art attacks, let me share you them.

Contents
Friday: Robert Guth at CCAS
Saturday: Material World at ANCA, plus some jazz
Sunday: Guerrilla printing day with Angela
Monday: Edible Books & farewell Lynda
Tuesday: Running away with ourselves
Wednesday: Remember to breathe

Friday
I'm actually not much of a one to go out on a friday night except to the movies but my ukulele group was invited to play towards the end of an end of a PhD event at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space. Plus it was a chance to catch up with lots of friends from art skool. So we went and won some odd things at the auction (and lost some wanted things that were outbid) and ate the yummy kangaroo doner kebabs and the endless hot fresh sugary donuts that kept pumping out of the donut machine and eventually the uke group found each other, dragged some chairs into a circle and had a play. We're not a very forward group, we fly under the radar a bit. No leaders, lots of attitude, unable to finish a song at the same time, but happy and jolly and with good taste in music. Well, we think we have. We played some Billy Bragg, Lou Reed, the Breeders, the Cure, Johnny Cash... you get the idea. Fairly Gen X, us. Most of the crowd had gone home by the time we started, but we played for the cleaner-uppers.

Saturday
A lovely visit to the Farmers Markets to buy yummies, into the studio for some Making time, and then my friend Angela Gardner arrived from Brisbane to spend a night and a day with me. Angela is a printmaker and poet, and byrd and I used one of her poems for our Demolition piece at Print Big a few years ago. We nattered for a while, and then it was time to go to ANCA for the opening of Material World, the show I'm in where we all had to make site-specific works with found objects. It as a wonderful opening, one of the best I've been to, mainly because it was low-key, friendly, there was heaps of food & wine and a band, and at 7.30 the lights were turned out for Earth Hour and we sat around the fires and looked at the candle-lit art and talked to each other happily. Narelle Phillips, one of the curators, writes up her experience here. She's an ace chick, and working with her is always a pleasure.

I enjoyed people's reaction to my work, once they found it. All you could see on the way in was the dangling bookmark ribbons, but if you went outside for a glass of wine and a bit of cheese and then walked back in, there it was, obvious as hell. Many people just assumed I'd filled the girder with intact books, because it looked very natural and un-artlike. Another friend came up to me and said that it frustrated him because there seemed to be no logic to the shelf arrangement. When I told him that it wasn't mean to be logical, and that the books were often in conversation with each other, he went back and spent TWENTY minutes looking at it. When he'd finished I asked if he was happier and he just shrugged, which I guess means NO, but... win for me, it engaged him for TWENTY MINUTES. How many other works of art can do that? Bless.

Afterwards we dragged ourselves away and over to a fabulous party close to our place, where some friends were farewelling their son as he flies to Berlin soon to complete a Masters in jazz. So there was more food and more wine and a stage where he and his mates got up and played a storm for us. We left at about 10.30, but apparently it all didn't finish until 3am. Who says Canberra is boring?

Sunday
Angela and I had a hope that we could have a play in the studio together before she left. She had a 5:15 flight, and in our favour was the change back from daylight saving, which gave us the feeling that we had an extra hour. We left the party at a decent time, despite the good jazz, to give ourselves a fighting chance of a solid day's play. So we awoke, and talked about texts for a while as BB made us a big cooked breakfast. We sat out the back and ate the big cooked breakfast and talked ideas and then hit the studio.

We worked with a new poem that had been brewing for a few weeks. I didn't grasp the meaning at first (sometimes takes a while with poems, don't you think?) which dismayed her, but once we discussed it and I talked about finding and creating a graphic starting point for the meaning, we were off. We set and printed an editioned letterpress broadside in one day! Mind you, the type is still sitting on my press today (I'll dismantle it once I finish typing); it was crazy fun. We're a good team: she arranged the wood type into cloud shapes while I tore up the paper (working out the dimensions as I tore, changing our minds once or twice) then I locked the wood type on the pressbed while she started setting the poem's text. She printed the embossed woodtype while I was her clean-hands assistant, then I set up the metal type while she put away the wood type and mixed the ink. We printed the last layer and finished with time to spare to look at a few other printed things and get to her plane. Phew! Here are a few photos:


Upside-down clouds!


Embossed clouds.


If we'd had more time I would have got this curve much smoother, but I did the best I could in a hurry.


The final work, drying on the rack.


Angela, working the press.


Happy, tired ladeez.

Over at Angela's blog you'll see the same photos and similar words from a different angle. I'm glad she liked listening to Dig Music with me. I've become quite addicted to it, and yesterday came home to discover that I've won a double CD of blues & roots music in a small competition they were running. Yay!

Monday
As well as teaching my normal class, I'd wrangled the students into making some edible books as part of the annual International Edible Books Festival and bringing them in for a 'lunch'. It was pretty rough and ready, since neither Ingeborg (the other teacher) and I had time to organise plates or tablecloths or such things, but the works themselves were delightful, and the ones that could be eaten (some were hypotheticals) were delicious.


I was very fond of these bananas. Have a look at my flickr site for the full range, many put a lot of effort into it. I loved being able to eat a miniature 'Animal Farm'!

Monday evening was spent, as usual, at my ukulele group, but this time we were farewelling a steadfast member who is moving to Melbourne. She is a beautiful singer, and there was much discussion about who could be 'the voice' now. We made her sing all 'her' songs in the songbook the group has compiled; she does a rendition of Joni Mitchell's 'A Case of You' that is almost better than the original and definitely better than any other cover I've heard. We also played 'Under the Milky Way Tonight' by the Church in honour of Jimmy Little, who'd died that day (or the day before?).

Tuesday
Tuesday I spent some time with a cousin of BB's, down for the Renaissance exhibition and when I dropped her at the bus back to Sydney, I kept going in to the uni and caught up with a dear friend to talk about life, the universe, and doing some work together. We had lunch and started talking about things that got very intense, and I finished by suggesting that we just drop everything for a few hours and go to the uni bar and play some pool. We giggled like schoolchildren as we played, completely invisible to the 20-somethings playing around us, except for the moment when T, a pool shark in her youth, got up on the table to do a particularly impressive backwards shot. That got their attention. It was tremendous fun and I went home afterwards feeling quite revived.

Wednesday


BB's lovely cousin took this photo of Padge.

So here I am, sitting in a quiet moment, ready to get back into the action again. More printing, some Folk Festivalling on Friday and then I'm going to the Blue Mountains for two days to celebrate a 50th birthday and to meet Dr Sister Outlaw's new kitten. I'm looking forward to Monday, pure sleep-in time, and maybe a movie date with my nice cooking man. Did I tell you that while Angela and I were printing, he was in the kitchen making cake, fig & pear paste, something else that I forget and spaghetti for dinner? My, this house buzzed last weekend.

When I get that feeling, I need textual healing

The type sampler continues apace. Well, in slow paces as I predicted, since my darling Bumblebee returned and other things started intruding.

Like the new course I'm teaching this year that I spent the weekend writing. For a few years now I've been teaching a class called 'Book Design' (a title not of my choice. I'd rather 'the book as art' or something), and in an attempt to keep the letterpress equipment used, I've up to now structured the course in two parts: one semester of learning artist book structures and the other semester working with letterpress. Now the art school has come fully in line with the rest of the university and all our courses have been changed to electives to be mixed & matched to make a degree, so I took the opportunity to ask my boss if I could slip in a new course called Typography: text in art. And o yeah, it was approved. Huzzar!

So now, in what can become a Book Minor to complement a printmaking Major, there is a fully book-centred Book Design course and a separate Typography course. It's not just letterpress; I want to look at artists who incorporate text in various forms into their work, whether painters, sculptors, textile artists, glass workers, woodies or whatever. I've been picking the brains of my friends for suggestions and I'd much appreciate your suggestions too.

One of my long-term favorites is Xu Bing and his Sky Book work. A recent favorite is my good friend Nicci Haynes, who treats text as image, and it's not meant to be legible. There's so many ways of creating text: letterpress, inkjet, laser prints, hand-writing, sewing, scratching, engraving, cutting, piercing, typewriters, stickers... and more. That's what this class will be exploring, as well as things like sourcing text, acknowledging and attributing, and writing your own. Fun!

This is one of my pieces, called 'Blue'. It's text from a vintage copy of Little Women collaged on to an old pianola roll, making the lyrics to New Order's 'Blue Monday'. From the 2010 exhibition '3 Chords & the Truth'.

Unfortunately, because it's the first year that it's offered, and no-one at the school knows what it's all about, Typography might not run this semester due to low enrolments. But it will stay on the books, and might get going next semester if I keep talking about it. Book Design, however, has ballooned, and we're going to run two classes this semester! Wow.

We've also had a house full of visitors this week. Not only have I had studio visitors, including wood engraver Tanya Myshkin (who is setting a book), but we've had family and friends staying. I love having a spare room, it keeps the house full of energy.

It's taken me four days to write this post as things keep leaping out at me. Since starting it I've laid out a Henry Lawson short story in a scholarly edition computer setting (lots of intricate fiddly bits); gone to my ukulele group (we don't wear Hawaiian shirts, but I have special Hawaiian sunset undies to get me in the mood) and learned 'Yellow Brick Road' (lots of intricate fiddly bits) and 'Butterfly Ball' (violently hated by some group members, and thus to be only played sporadically); had dinner with Barbara Blackman (ex-wife of Charles, a Best Beloved family friend) and had a meeting about the new course.

I have been reading, too: Cold Light, by Frank Moorhouse (loved the Canberra connection), Un Lon Don by China Mieville (which is a young adult book using a lot of the themes of Kraken, and very enjoyable); Love by Angela Carter, and right now, One of our Thursdays is Missing by Jasper FFFFFFFFforde. A little bit every day is good for the sleeping.

Today I had to find my recipe for beetroot risotto for BB, so I might as well relink to it here. Next on my list is to go roller-skating in the temporary public rink in the city. Fun! I don't know when, but I'll get there. I have to vacuum the studio today, I had a sparkie in yesterday to put in a new light in the dark corner of the studio and a power point near the press, so there's drilled crumbs of stuff everywhere. And then I'll get printing, a whole nother page. I have to get this sampler finished so that I can get on with 'real' stuff, like the new Book Art Object project.

Here's a picture of the kitties to finish, to remind us of what is real in life.

happy heart

On Friday I went to the ANU School of Art Grad Show opening to present my wee annual studio residencies to the people I'd chosen.

The actual selection was really hard - there are lots of very talented people that graduate every year, and this year is no exception. I had a wide range of choices, especially from Printmedia itself, which is having a very strong year. However, I have a real interest in working with people who are not printmakers by choice, mainly to see how they explore the notion of printing textually, so I always have a look around outside of the printmaking workshop for one of my choices.

It took me a while, but I came up with Louise Upshall, who is a painting graduate whose final work consisted of zines and collage, and who has a confronting (in a really good feminist way) called Cervixosaurus. Click that link if you want to be reassured that there are young women who still believe in feminism.

The second choice was Merryn Sommerville, from Printmedia & Drawing. In the words of Gillian Welsh, 'some girls are blessed with a dark turn of mind', and Merryn is one of them. Her work pretends to be pretty, but then grabs you by the throat. We've owned a print by her for a while now, from (I think) her first year of art school, and her final year work is devastating: eerie and creepy pastel drawings of children on dark paper, accompanied by ceiling-strung disembodied vintage childrens' clothes.

Here's Merryn, accompanied by a bevy of equally talented young things:


From left to right: Louisa, Edie, Rachel, Merryn. Merryn is wearing a vintage 1920s flapper dress, complete with sequinned fascinator.

Another reason to go to the opening was to listen to the guest speaker, Robyn Archer, who didn't disappoint. She kicked ass, talking about ambition; the ability, nay the necessity to fail; the fact that art doesn't have to please anyone but yourself, thanks very much; and she started the buzz for the Centenary year (2013) celebrations that she's organising by saying how much she wants the art school to participate because it's full of energy, talent and knows how to put on a good party. And yes, Kerryn, she said good things about Adelaide, mainly the fact that by the time she got to the world stage, she'd learned everything she'd needed to know from her small home city. She rawked.

So I gave out my prizes, and am looking forward to some fabulous conversations over lunch with those two young women...

...and then dashed off to my dinner appointment, around the corner of my neighbourhood, to the home of some friends who are amazing, um, homemakers is the wrong word, but I don't know what else to say. Their garden is magnificent, all interesting and useful and edible plants, with nice nooks to sit in and a big pizza oven setup. I went to eat pizza, and eat pizza I did.

Somehow over dinner we got talking about music, and about ukuleles. I know a lot of people who have taken up ukulele playing, not the least Helen Garner, whose short piece 'The Ukulele Club' was published in The Feel of Steel in 2001. Back then, she could write about a man from Sydney wanting to join the Melbourne Ukulele club:

They stared at me.
'Is there such a thing as a ukulele nerd?' said Sally.

Well, Sally, yes there is, and apparently now, ten years later, there are a lot of them around. Both of my pizza friends, F and M, play ukulele, but M is definitely a ukulele nerd. When I expressed interest in trying one, she brought out a few from her collection, one of which she had made herself.

We sat around the fire in the chilly summer night (!) and played something simple. I am a casual uneducated guitar picker from way back, unable to read music but able to followed chord tabs and with an ear for a tune, so I followed pretty well.

And fell hard.

M let me borrow one of her ukes. I took it home and downloaded too many songs from the internet and played all weekend. Of course I'm crap, and I can't sing, but I'd forgotten the simple pleasure of making one chord move into another in a way that makes your heart sing along.

I went to my first Uke Group on Monday night, and while it was tricky to keep up and sing at the same time, it was fun because it was completely inclusive, and non-competitive. And there were those chord changes, ringing into the heart.

My fingertips hurt. But now I know what I'm getting for Christmas... we're going to the music shop on Saturday.

so close...

I received the keys to our new house today and shared a bottle of bubbly* with a couple of close friends (in lieu of Best Beloved, who is on a study week away in Sydney) and forgot to take a photo.

It was a lovely feeling, sitting first in the back yard, then on the front step, then sprawled on the carpet of one of the empty rooms, drinking from some gorgeously sturdy French glasses that lovely Sacha gave me as our very first housewarming gift, knowing that this was the place that I was going to be operating from for the next umpteen years. It already felt like home, and there was nothing, nothing of mine in the place, except my son, who was just as delighted as I was.

So... no photo, sorry. I can only really blame myself for dropping my camera out of the car at Christmas time, and for just not thinking about the camera in my iPhone when I really should.

We're still waiting for an offer on the old house... we can't move into the new one until we've exchanged contracts, so I have to be patient, my creatures. At least now I can pop inside & sit on the floor instead of lurking around the cobwebby front garden.


In other, hopefully distracting news, semester has started at art school, and today I met my new booketeers for the first time. They seem a very keen, thoughtful, enthusiastic bunch, which is so cheering. I've also got a couple of exchange students auditing the class, so it's full to capacity, and makes the BookStud a touch snug.


Someone who drops by my studio to play with my press occasionally and travels to England frequently, loaned me a book about Lucien Pissaro (son of Camille), who started a press heavily inspired by the Arts & Craft movement. Which, once I'd looked at it, took me straight to my bookshelf to re-read The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt. Delicious, fabulous, mesmerising.

Bumblebee is enjoying year 8 much, much more than year 7. He's doing his first batch of electives, and to my surprise he chose Industrial Tech and Outdoor Ed. In the former he's coming home glowing after using chisels and planes, full of the praise of his dour teacher, having listened to my advice that he needed to focus on the tools rather than his friends. Mind you, this is the *only* class where he applies that focus, which is a pity. I wish all classes had dangerous elements that could cut and maim, maybe kids would do better if they did. The latter class is full of wonderful energetic, limit-pushing confidence-growing activities like sailing, rock-climbing and snorkel-diving. He's so excited. It's perfect for a 14-yo who is discovering how being tall and limber and fast is FUN. Bless him, he's changed so much over the last year or so.

Hmmm, coming down from the champagne. Wish Best Beloved was here to keep up the SQUEEEEEE feeling. Have to wake up early tomorrow to teach the UCan graphic design students. Might be time to snuggle up with the cats (who are going to LOVE their new domain) and read the book.

Good night!




*Our lovely real estate agents gave me a bottle of Moet with the keys, but I'm saving that for our first real night in the house.

Patronus

Here I am, venturing forth from my sickbed (well, sick house) to attend the ANU School of Art Patron's Day to pick out two interesting graduates for my Broadside Residency.

I'm standing in the main Gallery of the school, caught like a bug on a pin by Megsie from Glass Central Cenberra but the entire school is, for ten short days, a vast cornucopia of emerging art.

It's not a fabulous snap of me, but I thought I'd pop it here so that you can have a glimpse of the lovely little brooch that BB and B bought for my birthday. It's a tiny silver box with the sea inside it, beautifully modelled in perspective so that when you look in, you seem to be looking over the waves forever.

The brooch is by Jane Dodd, and we found it in a fab studio called Lure in Dunedin.

Straight after this I went home and had a nana nap. Looking at talent is exhausting.

Today I woke up to a fresh onslaught of head ache and sinus crappiness. I'm seeing the doctor this afternoon.

Two weeks out of the studio! What a waste of good free time. Bah.

Yeah yeah, catching up

Yeah, yeah, I know that I haven't blogged for a week or more, my dad keeps nagging me every time he sees me, which is a lot this week, because he's in town.

Partly it's because of my addiction to Farmville and the nice things I can do on it:

Maynard and Rory held their breath:
were the stories of Grandpa's secret collection of 1950s p0rn really true?

Partly it's because I don't seem to have time to scratch myself, and in the spaces in between, I just want to plant and pat and harvest (see? Farmville again).

But here I am, feeling a bit worn out and off-colour at work, not wanting to operate heavy machinery, so in between small helpful tasks, I'm going to get you up to date.

Where was I? Goodness, I left you at the point when I was joyously riding my bike at night. That was a while ago.


TALKING

I gave a public lecture at the Art Skool's regular weekly lunchtime lecture series, Art Forum. If you're ever scratching around for something to do in Canberra at 12 on a Wed or 1 on a Thurs, there's usually a visiting artist or staff member talking about their practice. I missed one a few weeks ago by someone who went through Sculpture when I was a student who has become the technical assistant to Bridget Riley (Op Art queen)! O wot fun.

My talk was about the work I do with other people, and explaining that shorter projects with driven people or making smaller pieces for theme-based group shows always get precedent over my own larger projects because they are easier to juggle with home, work, Farmville, etc. Well, I didn't mention FV, but many of the people listening are Facebook friends and must be inundated with the stoopid notifications that get generated and published (that can be hidden, quite easily, if they are too annoying).

Of course, I talked too fast. I always do unless I can remember to slow down. I always feel like talking slowly makes me sound like I have a speech impediment, but if I hear a recording, I sound quite normal. When I hear a recording of what I think is normal speech, I sound like the tape has been sped up. Sigh.


SICK

Bumblebee was sick that day, and I made him sit up the back of the lecture theatre and listen. He's been ill for about a week now, with a really horrid head cold. I had to teach on Saturday and Sunday and Monday, so lovely Best Beloved did the nursing honours. It made sense on Monday especially, because he gets paid regardless if he stays home to mind sick child, and I don't, being the absolute bottom of the food chain and paid by timesheets.

I have been fighting off his cold, but I think it's tightening its grip. Olive leaf extract and masses of VitC is helping, but I may have to spend some of this weekend actually resting. Such an alien concept!


TEACHING & LEARNING

I taught a course at Megalo on Saturday and Sunday on Asian Stab Bindings and Coptic Binding. It was a lovely group of women who got on very well together, and that makes all the difference. If the class dynamic is good, everything is smooth and jolly, and if not, it's a slog.

The funniest part for me was that one person (whose name I shall not mention but she works with me here at Art Skool and you know who you are :) ) forgot her glasses EACH DAY, and discovered that another woman's glasses worked with her eyes, so all weekend they were passing the glasses back and forth as if they were the Graeae passing around their eyeball. If I ever get the sustained time to write a short story, I'll have characters doing the same...

I was very honourable, as always, when the participants filled out their feedback forms, assuring them that I wouldn't peek so that they could be totally honest in their feedback. I always keep my word about that, and juts popped the envelope under the office door as I was going home. On Tuesday, when I went to collect my gear, the Director of Megalo was really pleased, and sat me down to read the feedback, which was all really, really positive. Yay! Again, mostly to do with the luck of the class dynamics, it's always great when everyone helps each other and enjoy themselves.

I'm teaching a one-day course on concertina books at the Tuggeranong Art Centre on June 5th, if anyone fancies it. Should be lots of fun.

I'm also doing (as a student) a one-day course at Megalo on woodblock printing on June 12th, which should be ACE. I'm keen on collecting skills that don't need large and expensive equipment, and have always wanted to learn Japanese image transfer and inking techniques.


VISITORS

I don't know if you've ever noticed, but my dad isn't the only family member who actively prompts me about my blogging. I have an auntie from WA, Auntie Lou, who reads and works up the courage to leave comments quite often.

Well, this week I am having a visit from The Aunties: Auntie Lou (my dad's youngest sister) and Auntie Jan (the oldest sister). They are doing a Grand Tour fuelled by the immense number of frequent flyer points accrued by my miner uncle, Bill: enough to go around the world four times, apparently, but instead are getting L and J here business class and hiring a car and staying at some pretty swanky venues. They're also having a visit to Mary MacKillop's grave or some such thing, to celebrate her saintliness.

Auntie Lou is not well, with many dramatic health problems that keep her mostly housebound. Uncle Bill refuses to travel with her because the risk of things going wrong is fairly high (last time she visited us, when Bumblebee was a little tucker, she ended up in a Canberra hospital, ferried by an ambulance in the middle of the night, which was a bit scary!), but Auntie Jan has been persuaded to accompany her, and is a perfect companion: efficient, supportive and completely calm. And able to laugh in the face of anything, a family trait.

Last night I went out to dinner with the Aunties, Colonel & Lady Duck, and their friends, my godparents. The visitors are staying at Uni House, so we took over the posh restaurant there, Boffins. As their ad says, Boffins 'exudes quiet sophistication', an atmosphere that we shot to pieces with our raucous family banter, swapping stories about grandchildren and nostalgic recollections of their children (including me). I learned a fab new word for a woman's bagina (as Zoe calls it): a 'minnie', used by one of the WA grandkids, recounted to our tearful howls of laughter.


UH OH

Poor old Bumblebee saw more minnies than he'd planned to the other day. I'd set up his laptop with basic parental controls, and meant to do some more stringent things when I had a moment, and he and I had agreed that besides typing his homework, he could only check his gmail and play on Facebook. Anyhoo, he's been playing this game on FB called Wild Ones, and loves it. He hadn't bookmarked it, and one afternoon decided to find it by googling it. Well. You can guess what happened, can't you? I was sitting nearby and saw him looking at his screen with a weird look on his face: shock, confusion, and concentration. He saw me looking at him, and lowered his laptop screen slightly. I said jokingly, 'what's up, you looking at pr0n?' He lowered his screen even more and looked even more uncomfortable.

Oh noes! I thought. And got him to close the laptop.

Colonel and Lady Duck were visiting at the time, and we all sat around and talked over the issue. It was an interesting afternoon, and I think we handled it well, with sympathy and humour and not making him feel too shameful about having accidentally found the site.

Later on, once I'd spent a long overdue while setting his Google search settings and set up stronger parental controls (snaps to Bernice for the help), I had a look at what he'd been looking at. I could understand his confusion... thanks to our modern predilection for shaving, it was very hard to work out exactly what you were seeing, and it was like a very odd game of twister.

When I told him the next day that I'd set the computer up so that it would be very hard to recreate the experience, his response was genuine relief. But his cred has gone up a bit with his friends... and it has allowed some very frank discussions about what women *actually* look like and what an industry like that entails.

Took a while for my heart to settle down... breathe, breathe. Shows how easily this stuff can happen. I'm very glad that I insist he uses the laptop in a shared space, not locked away in his bedroom.


TALKING AGAIN

So tonight there's an opening at ANCA of a show of the work of two lovely friends, Genevieve Swifte and Nicci Haynes, called Shifting Signs. They have collaborated on the works, showing two separate bodies of prints & drawings and a few shared pieces. And there's even drawings on the walls themselves. The opening is at 6pm, and I'm the opening speaker... So I have to remember to speak. slowly.

Also, I'm featured (along with two other artists) in this week's issue of the Canberra Chronicle, or Chronic, as Crit calls it. I haven't seen the piece yet, as I've only just won my battle to stop having the community paper delivered. It wasn't the paper itself, it was the bugger who delivered it, and the weird ways it was deposited on our land. I started with an official sticker saying 'No junk mail. No Chronicle', which was ignored. Then I moved to handwritten notes, stuck onto the postbox, and then nailed onto the front verge in the last place the paper had been dumped. I was collecting a stack of them in their horrid plastic baggy things, ready to spell 'NO CHRONICLE' on the front verge in newspapers, just in case they were being thrown out of a plane, but then I noticed that they had stopped, and now I'm happy. But now I'm in the paper. So I'm asking people to save me a copy. Crit's doing it, so I know I'll get one.

The article itself is about an exhibition down at the Tuggeranong Arts Centre (Tuggeranong means 'Land of the long grey tracksuit') called The Story is the Thing, featuring artist's books featuring storytelling. I have a piece in it, but I'm featured in the article mostly to promote the associated workshop on concertina books that I mentioned earlier.

Phew. I think that's about all. I'll leave it at that for now.

Autumnery

Yesterday I discovered that if you go to the farmers market with a friend you haven't seen for ages, you spend a lot longer shopping than on normal weeks. But it was a lot of fun giving her a conducted tour; at one point I was showing her one stallholder's exquisite gypsy ham and explaining that it was ok to buy a big lump all at once because you could cut it up and freeze chunks, when the woman next to me thanked me for the tip and bought a nice big chunk for herself. Public service in Canberra is so much more than being in KRudd's employ.

It was such a beautiful Autumn weekend, one of those times when it's positively criminal to stay indoors... but I had a book to make, and I've been putting it aside in favour of other tasks for so long that I just had to get in there and do it. Luckily the first stage of making meant that I had to go to the Book Stud at the Art School, and that meant that I could see the trees and the sky from its wonderful large windows, and even in the inking slab.



I was making monoprints. I was making monoprints all weekend, editions of them, which is a strange thing do really. I talk more about it here, and I also explain why I'm editioning them. However, right here, right now I've got other things to share before dragging myself off to bed.

I love working at the art school, for many reasons, not in the least that strange things happen at random times. On Wednesday, I looked out of the window and saw the usual view down to the Sculpture workshop:



Except... except. Something was different, and I went down to investigate further. This is what I found, instead of the usual OH&S signage:



Installation piece? Protest? Prank? I have no idea. It had a companion piece:



All I know is that the next day, they weren't there.

Anyhoo, last night I cooked a stupendous yummy:



This is my pasta sauce just before I poured it onto hot spiral pasta: home-smoked chicken (BB's latest craze is home smoking), mushrooms, Russian garlic, leeks, baby spinach, white wine and thick cream (cleaning out the fridge, normally we'd have used plain yoghurt). It was sooooo nice that I thought I should share the thought of it with you.

Anyhoo anyhoo, as I rode my bike home from the art school in the dark tonight (without a front light! Naughty! Note to self: batteries for bike light. My back red flashy thing still works fine), the thermometer outside the ABC showed that it was my all-time favorite temperature: 13 degrees. Cold enough to need a jumper or jacket but not cold enough to make your teeth chatter or to need gloves on the hands. Lovely. Ah, Autumn, how I love thee so.

BB bought the first series of Six Feet Underground while he was in Melbourne, so we started watching it. I'm such a late starter on everything, it means that when I want to rave about something, everyone else is just so over it. Sigh. Luckily I don't care too much, it's still pretty fun.

What about the hipster daleks on Dr Who tonight? Bumblebee went nuts, was so excited, and all I could think was how clever they were to produce 5 or 6 separate collectibles rather than one. How can I get mistily excited about a tree in my front yard that drops its golden-yellow leaves to reveal the nattiest little brown baskets full of black berries, and yet feel so cynical towards a bit of redesigned cult product?

I'll ponder this in bed. Might get me to sleep faster.

nice shiny newness

Such is the miracle of on-linery, you have no way of knowing that I am writing this post on my brand new Macbook Pro laptop, the one that is subtly shiny in a way that only brushed aluminium can be, the one that has subtly drained my bank account of all shininess. You'll just have to take my word for it.

I have resisted the allure of portable computery (are my new words making your teeth ache?) for many years now, but have decided that it's time to be able to take things between studio and home, to have less of an office presence at home (and therefore the big clean-out), and that it's nice to be able to play on-line scrabble in bed.

So aloha to my computer set-up, the most fitting word because apparently it means hello and goodbye; very soon I will be (fruitlessly, I suspect) trying to sell bits of my old set-up on ebay, trying to get something back for the vast amount of money I've spent on it through the years... something, anything.

In other exciting news, I just dropped Bumblebee off at school for his Year 7 camp, and the wave of parental excitement at having THREE WEEKDAY DAYS OFF was palpable. I surfed the wave, then I jumped into it, and am now thinking how nice it will be to hang around tonight at the art school for an opening rather than dash home to argue (yet again) about whether the tv can be on during dinner or not. They are headed to the Snowy Mountains for multicultural tasks like dragonboat racing and gladiator challenges. B looked highly excited this morning, wearing my old red giggle hat that he has always coveted (but since he last saw it, it has faded to a charming shade of rose-pink that none of us were game to point out this morning in case he rejected the use of it outright. Luckily none of his mates seemed to care either, calling it a 'cool hat').

I haven't been in my studio since last week, because I spent the weekend at Megalo with some of the Canberra Bookbinders' Guild learning how to make marbled paper with a wonderful teacher called Joan Ajala. I was particularly interested in the 'Spanish' technique, where the marbling ripples on the page to create a pleated-silk sort of effect, and I'm pleased to say that I managed it by the end of the weekend. I've got them pressing at the moment, then I might remember to scan some and show you...

I'm still in the process of transferring files and preferences and things, and moving furniture and gasping at deadlines that need to be met, so forgive my probable once-a-weekness for a while. Today at work I have the unenviable task of getting all the workshop's teaching notes on to the new ANU intranet thingy (called WATTLE). And I'll meet all the new students, and catch up with all the returning ones. I do like hanging out at the art school.

broad sides & hyphens

O hai

I've not been around, I've been off socialising with my non-social-network network. How quaint, to sit face to face with people and catch up on news that is older than five minutes.

In the meantime, I've been accruing dotpoints:

-- firstly, go here and have a damn good chortle.

-- back? Wasn't that funny?

-- When I mentioned the other day that I was selecting future Duckettes, what I meant was: I've established a little residency for a couple of graduating students (from my art skool) to come to Studio Duck and print an edition of letterpress broadsides each. Broadsides are essentially posters, usually incorporating text and imagery, most often poetry, but not always.

So I got the chance to walk around the school and get a preview of the grad show to find potential people. I had one pretty much chosen beforehand, but I have had so many good students come through the Book Studio and play with the letterpress facilities, that choosing the second was tricky.

Eventually I made my choice, and then on Friday I went along to the prize-giving ceremony and gave out my residencies, doing the whole shake-and-kiss thingy for good measure. So stay tuned for the adventures of Peter and Natalie and their broadsides, which will hopefully be produced in a couple of months or so! I've bought all the paper, so now I just have to get them into the studio and get planning with them.


Bumblebee's photo -- from afar and above -- of me presenting my award to one of the two. The poles are tricksy things :)

Peter graduated from Printmedia & Drawing, and he does the most beautiful wood engravings from found wood that he prints in really interesting ways and also produces books from them that are like slow motion animations. Natalie is a Photography student, but her bookwork is very separate from her photography: very text-based and quirky. I think the two of them will make very different broadsides, which is what I want -- I'm planning to keep a small part of the edition aside to form a limited edition folio in five or ten years time, and it should be a really diverse bunch of broadsides.

-- After the award ceremony I took Bumblebee out to see a local outfit called Mr Fibby. The frontman used to be/is B's drama teacher, and they are very good. Have a listen for yourself. B was alternately in stitches and enthralled, and now he thinks he knows what he wants to do when he grows up.

-- This morning I had breakfast with an old friend who has been busy producing her own music for many years in the background of a busy money-poor love-rich creative-community life and is now hovering on the brink of her first album release. I'd love you to also have a listen to her music (especially Jack and Angel, the latter being a song I first fell in love with yonks ago sitting on a beach under the stars when we were in a very small band together) because if you like it, please support her by buying one of the albums in a few weeks and telling all your friends about it. I'll remind you again when it's released.

-- This afternoon I'm going to a get-together of members of my old art school workshop, the now-extinct-in-all-but-our-hearts Graphic Investigation Workshop. If you're an ex-student of GIW, and didn't know that there was a GIW Facebook group, come and join it now.

-- I got Bumblebee into the studio yesterday to help me print a Xmas card for this year. To my relief, he liked using the printing press, although he needed to use both arms to work it, and he had to take regular breaks. I haven't mentioned that B is not feeling the best at the moment -- he has permanently swollen glands in his neck and low energy, and we're undergoing various tests to identify the problem. He hasn't got Glandular Fever -- although he's HAD it, the tests reveal -- but it could be post-viral, or something else altogether. He's not terribly ill or anything, just not firing on all cylinders. And he's proved himself to be a very good Printer's Devil, which bodes well for the future!


(More photos of his printing at flickr)

We also had a bit of a visitor in the studio the day before:



Discovered (thankfully) just before I actually put my hand on the water bottle, as I was reaching for it. Byrd was passing by, and he's very good at moving spiders, to Bumblebee's relief.

Have to go! Running late for re-onion.

Country stuff

The Country Show opening was great: lots of yummy things, lots of fun activities.

I'm just trying to herd the cats into a box to get them down to the parental farm for the weekend -- parentals are in WA -- but Padge hasn't shown, and I'm afraid our departure may be delayed until he can be found!

So I haven't got time to write more, other than that BB won second prize in the cake comp for his Quince & Nut Cake and Bumblebee won second prize in the chook raffle, so I now have a very annoying rubber chicken squawking at me whenever he's home.

Photos next week, when I can get some from the gallery. I was -- ahem -- selling raffle tickets at a table, so missed out on a lot of the action. The drawing of the raffle was very fair though: we sold hundreds of tickets, and Bumblebee only had four in the mix. it was drawn by the child an artist not in the show!

COUNTRY SHOW TONIGHT

Fairy floss, sausage sizzle, cake competition, chook raffle (chooky art, not a frozen chicken, so vegan-friendly), the Toffee-apple Lady, and much much more...

You don't have to be an artist or even interested in art! Just come!

Amazon Throne redux

Firstly, and this is probably to your relief, I've decided to stop apologising for being busy. Enough snivelling, more fun and breathing. OK. Onwards.

A few weeks ago, when Betty swung by and we did a bit of arty sightseeing, I included my studio in the tour. He did what every reading person does when they walk in: browse my bookshelves. And of course, because he is a big Tom Phillips fan, the first thing that caught his eye was my copy of The Humument.

Just in case there's anyone who doesn't know about this project: it's probably the most famous altered book that there is. Phillips is an Englishman who gave himself a project: find a book that would cost him less than something tiny and pre-decimal, and play with it graphically. He gave himself a few rules about what he was doing, and created a character out of finding two words that appeared together infrequently, and then got so caught up in what he'd created, that he kept buying more copies of the book and publishing editions of his altered version. That link, above, goes to the Official Humument Site, where there are slideshows of the pages, etc.

One of the factors of finding the book in the first place was not just cost, but geographic proximity to London's secondhand book district. Phillips is one of those artists who likes to explore his local area, and is fascinated by the concept of place. Alongside his celebrated portraiture work is a whole body of work based on exploring one area, or a journey taken frequently. This is something he has in common with Betty, who frequently posts about geographical places from his memory.

I also like Tom Phillips, but I actually have an edition of The Humument (commercially reproduced, of course, nothing original) because there is a long tradition (at least, at my art school) of art students becoming obsessed with it for at least a term, and trying to do their own version of playing with pages in the same way. I am no exception.

I recently stumbled upon my version again, named after the title of my found book: Amazon Throne. I blogged about it a few years ago, briefly. Bernice wanted more. So I'm going to share some more. There is a vague storyline, based upon a character called Domitila who is a South American princess being married off to some charmless prince called Dom Joao. She's sharp, he isn't. And that's about it. Apart from that, I just had fun with the crappy women's magazines that my Nana has been giving me for years (I just got a pile the other day!). I combined paint, drawing and collage, in a much cruder way than the master artist Phillips. Remember that I was in first year of art school, or maybe even before that, when I was doing night classes. It still has the power to make me chortle, I love having a sense of humour.

I hope you like these. They're in no particular order, much like my mind :)
My absolute favs from the series are in that earlier post, but I like these too.



For the hard of screening, the text reads There was a noticeable shortage, but regal bearing made up for minor deficiencies


Translation: She loved rich ostentation. With animal vigour she indulged in voluptuous excesses, refusing to cede an inch of her fishwife's vocabulary


No, this was no time to think of menus

Actually, when I peer into the bits that I can read under the paint, I wish that I'd kept this book intact. As you can see, I'm using large chunks of sentences, not 'found' words, and the writing is tres amusing. I can remember liking it, but not thinking about keeping it. Pity.

snort du jour

Best Beloved is away for work until Friday night.

I worked until 1am last night, because I could.

Best Beloved makes me breakfast in bed every weekday, but the catch is that he brings it to me at 6:30am, something I'm normally cranky about, but the truth is that if he's not around, I forget to eat breakfast, so I must learn to stop grumbling at 6:30am.

Padge woke me up at 7:30am, walking around me in circles and banging me on my forehead with his forehead at every pass, and then I started working again, interspersed with school lunches etc. And I forgot about breakfast. So here I am in my Bookstud office, yawning with a grumbly tummy. I've just set up my work for the Art-i-Techs show:



and had a look around, and it is a really terrific show. I'll try to take some photies later in the day when the labels are up.

What was I doing with this post? Oh! Thank goodness I wrote the title first. The snort de jour isn't staying up late nor forgetting to eat nor reminding you that I'm exhibiting; it is this. Enjoy.

Feeling stretched thin

I've been working hard over the weekend, teaching Japanese and Coptic bookbinding at (the beautifully renovated) Megalo, so I had to pack a weekend's worth of downtime into last night's fanfic-ish Lost in Austen. Combined with a couple of stiff G&Ts, it did very well as a mini-break, apart from the fact that I spent a small amount of time before dropping off to sleep wondering if Mr Darcy would still love Amanda Price when her fake auburn hair developed a major root-line.

Today I did more Coptic binding with my art school students before traipsing them over to the Menzies Library to view some more of the Petr Herel collection of artists' books. This is an archive of many of the books and print folios made during the 20-odd years of the Graphic Investigations Workshop under the careful and philosophical Czech eye of Petr Herel. It's an under-valued and under-used little gem in the ANU library collections, and fully able to be accessed by appointment. I think I'm the only person to use it, so I try to take a group of students at least twice a year, and even if they're revisiting with me, they still come away delighted. The link above is to a poor archival website; if you'd like to browse the actual records, click here.

In other news, entries are coming in for my upcoming exhibition Books to Hold or Let Go, a group exhibition of various bindings of my latest fine press book (I'm planning to write a few things about this really soon, once I've got my slate a bit clearer). I'm trying to keep up with things on my website, and should have even more images later in the week. I can't believe we're already halfway through March; the exhibition opens on May 14, which is really not that far away...

teh cercle of liff

Ahh, the start of the academic year brings a new routine: bliss. I'm such a 'flight path' kinda gal in many all ways. I don't mind my routines changing, as long as the changes settle into another kind of routine before too long. I swear, if society crashed tomorrow with no power and food and neighbours fighting each other for water, I'd be cool with it as long as I could settle into some sort of foraging/scragging routine.

The 'flight path' these days is a circuit between the house, the university and my studio. I tend only to do things that fit within whatever flight path I'm on, and that includes seeing friends, unfortunately, and has always been thus unless they squawk enough to break me out of my daily reverie, or front up to my house bearing cold bottles of wine. Dr Sista Outlaw managed it last weekend, Bernice has turned into a weekly fronter in return for a meal and/or the loungeroom airbed (she commutes to Canberra for some of Kevin's PS largesse), and Byrd has worked out that the best time to catch me is 8.30pm on a Wednesday as I settle in for my dose of Adam Hill.

I'm very committed -- we, as a family, have become very committed -- to constructing our lives around our local area so that our flight paths can be travelled by bicycle. I think there's only one day of the week now where I absolutely have to drive the car, and that's because the Aged Poet lives across the lake and I often have to drive her places, but I guess if I ever had to, she's not so far that I couldn't ride. And now that I'm carting things between studio and BookStud, I've finally got around to getting a bicycle basket! What a difference a tray makes; having a basket is just so good that I'm kicking myself for not having organised it years ago. Even not having to wear a backpack as I'm riding is helping my shoulders and neck to relax after work. And now that the weather is getting cool in the mornings, I'm loving the ride. Happy!

It's also nice to have a head-space separation between the Bookstud and my studio. I've been meaning to tackle the helltype in the Bookstud for years now, but usually get distracted by the urge to fold a few pages /set some type/ print a wee poster while I talk to students or residents, but now I can really knuckle down and clean the place up. Mind you, this is an annual resolution (happy new academic year!) and rarely gets far, but I've already cleaned out one tray of type bundles this morning, that included projects that are at least ten years old, and I'm feeling righteous. My ultimate aim is to have all the type in its right place, all the dust vacuumed up (I have a natty German type vacuum, with special speeds and netting over the hose etc), and all the type catalogued. And then I'll be starting on my own personal collection at my studio. Once I can lift the trays. That's one thing I'm NOT doing today. Sorting *only*.

I also rediscovered the Book Studio blog, poor neglected creature that was put thoroughly on the backburner last year because there was just so much going on. Well, this year's visitor promises to have an exciting, constantly evolving project, and I'm going to do my darndest to document it on the blog. So if you're interested, throw the URL back on your feedreaders.

OK, that's my tea-break done. Back to the type.

major imposition

For the past few weeks I have been falling in love with a blog called Editorial Anonymous. Very good advice about publishing, especially if you aspire to be a children's book writer.

The post I read today is *exactly* what I need for explaining page imposition. Not so much for explaining how to print in sections, but why books have to be planned around certain magical numbers, and they are never odd ones.



Read it and understand, aspiring book-makers (and writers). I will be putting this on my FAQ-so-go-and-look-it-up list in the BookStud (with full acknowledgement, but of course).



I have been binding furiously, filling backorders and trying to get ahead of myself a little bit. I'm almost there. 10 days and counting until I'm under the knife. Same deadline as the students getting ready for assessment at the art school. As you walk down the corridors, you walk through weird balloony walls of anxiety and stress like the bubbles in Donny Darko.

First reminder: the annual ANU School of Art graduating student show is on Friday the 5th of December at 6pm, and will run through to the 14th of December. It's well worth a look, and there's some good art to be had at very reasonable prices.

Oh, and I just can't resist these two to finish:

Words and Music

Well, I can only apologise for the photography that follows, but I did promise a virtual exhibition, so here goes:

With these fracking 10-week/3-week terms we're given now, I devised a cunning plan for my students. I proposed that we spend 6 weeks playing loosely with letterpress, just printing stuff that took our fancy (mostly woodtype, because there's no real time to set chunks of small type with four-hour classes), and then 4 weeks playing with the results. After the hols (i.e. now), they were to come up with the goods, which would be publicly displayed until assessment time, and the leftover few weeks would be spent just skillin' up on a few bookbinding techniques in class, so that they could spend their out-of-class time finishing those essays and major projects that the other people in their learning lives were demanding (I remember this time of year well from my student days).

And they did it. I lost a couple of people along the way, some for good and some who just wandered back in when they were ready, and who came with their work ready to mount. The theme of the project was MUSIC. Remember that these are students from all over the school, who are doing the class as an elective, so they range from Ceramics major, to Textiles, to Photomedia, etc. Here's what came out of it:


This is the overview shot. The case is in the school library, which is a great spot to be in this time of year for obvious reasons. I'll walk you through from left to right.


Window 1: Jenny (top), Angela (bottom left), Trillian (bottom right -- I really love saying that girl's name. She's just happy she wasn't born a boy. She handles the reaction from HGG fans like me really well).


Jenny discovered that letterpress works on fabric (although a warning -- the fabric has to be absolutely flat, and sometimes the grain of the fabric can mark the woodtype), and ran this chiffon scarf over her set type. It looks fabulous. You can see in the overview shot above that she printed a singlet, too.


She also made these CD 'chapters' that combine her printing with fantastic industrial fabric swatches that we were given. She also bound a hardback book with a lot more of her printing inside. She's fallen in love with traditional bookbinding.


Angela loves origami, and the way she can make books that move. She's a ceramicist; I don't think ceramics get to move very much, although I think the bookmaking has made her think about that issue. These are her 'musical chairs'. The chair on the left is a 'title' chair; the middle chairs are attached to each other in a chain, and the two on the right are separate individuals.


Trillian is a very capable person generally. She hasn't finished her piece, only because she wanted to make something I hadn't taught her yet (cased bindings), so she's going to make it next week, and in the meantime we chose one of her lovely page spreads to hold the spot. She's working with her letterpress and mixing it with digital text and images, plus making a binding that from the start will be falling apart, like so many hearts in songs. Should be fun.


Window 2: Suse (behind), J (in front).


A detail of Suse's 'Rhythm' piece. You can see the whole thing above. She's a musician herself, and takes music very seriously, so this was an exploration of actual rhythms and how they correspond to word length and size.


I took photos of all three of J's 'guitara' pieces, but the middle one didn't come out -- you can see it above.


Each one uses a found box, with a hole cut in the lid and rubberband 'strings', and then he's played with his printed matter, folding and cutting it to interact with the boxes.


Window 3: Poppy Malik (top left), Libby (top right), Beatrix Cottonmouth (bottom left), D. Carnac Edwards (bottom left). As you can see, I have a number of students already working on their artistic identities (not that I can talk).


Poppy did some lovely letterpress, using sentences that were like little short stories, but she didn't use any of it here. She likes making her 'little pretties' as she calls them. These LPs are paper diamonds of typed drafting film. Each diamond is a typed dream. And glitter. This year the print workshop is full of glitter and the sound of typewriters :)


I haven't done this one justice. It's a hard one to reproduce, because there are layers of text in amongst the sheer curtain fabric. Libby calls this 'It hurts my ears'; other lines include 'squawk squawk' and 'it would not stop'. The fabric is held together with a piece of retro gold crochet thread, and the whole lot is suspended from a hook on the side of the cabinet. It makes me think of a hanged parrot created from the remnants of some granny's sitting room.


Something about this one really appeals to me. The text inside this book object, printed on white cotton quilting fabric, says 'Inside a bed of bone' and the inside ball says 'soft red muscle thumps'. Letterpress on cloth with red wool and thread. The things Beatrix makes are often very sweet with that edge of macabre.


And lastly, this one is called 'Moustache Remnants'. I love the way he's made 'rooms' from his book, which is bound with a figure-of-eight stitch so that it can bend in all sorts of configurations. He's added some textile pieces, which seem to act like prayer rugs in the rooms. I don't know if he thought of it this way; I hope he has or will. Each line is a line of a song, and they were originally set and printed as letterpress, but he's then photocopied the words and reprinted them...



So there you go. Lots of interesting thoughts and deeds. Next week we're making a cased-in binding (a hardback book) and the week after, a clamshell box, and then the teaching year is over again. Where does it all go?