Hand Set at UNSW Canberra

I just realised that I haven't put this up here:


This is my exhibition, up until the 10th of September at the UNSW Canberra Library (aka ADFA) and I'm also giving an artist's talk this Saturday (25th) at 2pm if you're around and interested in hearing (as opposed to reading) the stories behind the work.

Vale Aged Poet

The Spirit to the Body

So – you have served me well and we have been
Comrades in action.
Together took we keen and sharp delight
In racing limbs and outstretched arms and hands,
In every cell obedient to command.
The sudden thrill and ecstasy of head
Thrown backwards to the buffeting of the wind.
I have seen Nature through your eyes,
Its beauty – wind and fire and sun and rain,
Heard by your ears and spoke through your lips.
And now regretting it we two shall go
Splendid into the darkness, naked, free,
But for a little while; then you shall be
Dust blown about the windways of the world,
And I a sigh in all Eternity.

Rosemary Dobson



My Aged Poet died on Wednesday. It was very gentle, very peaceful, and I have no doubt that she had a very good death, with caring people around her. I saw her a few hours beforehand, so I had a chance to say goodbye, and she looked like a little bird curled in the bed, breathing with her eyes closed.

She had turned 92 just the week before, and because she was almost completely blind, I'd taken her the smelliest bunch of flowers I could find: jonquils, sweet peas, freesias and hyacinths. Thank goodness for florists who can access spring flowers in winter! I wanted her to dream of flower-filled meadows, to wake up to glorious scents. It was a good present for someone who had everything and needed nothing.

The poem above was written in her teens, and published in a small book that she set and printed herself at her school, also making the linocut that graced the cover. She always joked that the book should be called Smeop, because she forgot to reverse the title text in her initial attempt. It was published in 1937, when she was 17. That's over 75 years of poetry, peoples, that's a pretty good innings.

Not only had she got past her birthday, she'd also seen her complete Collected updated and republished by UQP this year, released in April. After that, it's no wonder she let go. It was time to catch up with her husband, Alec Bolton, who died in 1996. He ran his own private press, Brindabella Press, which produced over 23 fine press books, and it was through his printing and design sense that I got to know him, and consequently her.

I can't believe it's been 15 years since I started helping Rosemary sort Alec's papers, and then her papers, a weekly session that moved away from literary help to more simple things like going shopping, sitting out in the sun and reading aloud, and finally holding her hand at the bedside and telling her about the world outside, persistently moving on as she slowed down. I learned a hell of a lot from her: about poetry, poets, the 1940s, art, discipline, dignity and also about Standards, among other things. We didn't always see eye to eye, but those struggles are always the interesting parts of friendship.

I can't think of her passing as a tragedy; she lived long and well and was loved, it's as much as anyone can ask for. My thoughts are with her family right now: she will leave a large hole.

There is a wonderful obituary here. The photo was taken by her son, Rob; It's lovely and informal.

snakes and ladders

Gosh, it's been a whirlwind of a fortnight. Sorry, I just looked up and realised that I hadn't even checked my email since Friday night. And working full-time just sucks your life away, doesn't it? Lots of time to do inane Facebook things in the background, no time to do anything meaningful. It just sucks. I remember now why I gave up my full-time office job, there's really no time to be fully-functioning in the world. Mind you, Best Beloved thrives in his job. He loves Serving the Public. Go figure.

Emotionally we've all been thrashing one way and another, with one niece on the brink of death last weekend (conveniently while we were in Sydney so that I could teach a (lovely, if I may say so myself) weekend workshop at Warringah Printmakers, hence we could go and sit by her Intensive Care bedside) and another niece giving birth yesterday to an enormously gorgeous baby, making us all Very Young Great Aunts and Uncles. The Very Young Grandparents are being extremely wise in seeing this as the opportunity to have a Very Long and Happy Relationship with their grandchild. Congratulations to them, and a big sigh of relief that the other niece (from a separate branch of the same family) is recovering. Apologies for all the parentheses, it's all pretty complicated.

This weekend was the big Books-on-Bookshelves moving. Lots of boxes to heave and empty. I worked out a system based on my experience with letterpress. Letterpress takes a long time to set up, with very quick printing. It's always an exercise in patience. So. I emptied all of my boxes (left BB to do his own, always safest) and sorted all the books into A to Z on the floor, and then once that was done, put them on the shelves, sorting further into A-Z within each letter as I shelved, and dissing the ones I just didn't connect with (or had multiples of, having bought them again unwittingly) as I went.



Here's a view of stage 1. This is all the novels, with the bookcase up the back filled with poetry. I had grand plans to enter all the books into LibraryThing as I went (those that aren't on already), having bought a lovely little cat-shaped scanner that works with it, but the scanner is in a box somewhere and I couldn't be bothered working manually and slowly to enter them. Sigh.

Of course, the cats helped.



So at the time of writing MOST of the books are on shelves. There are still lots of boxes of various stuffs that need to be sorted, and a garage sale to be had, and then I can do serious studio prep, like painting and floor coverings. The press move is booked for 22 July, and I'm just about to steel myself to write my official email to ANCA to let them know when I'll be out. Exciting but scary.

Hopefully now I'm going to have more time to write and read blogs. I also want to get some printing done and share it with you, as it's not been a terribly big making year so far. I'll leave you with the brooches that I made for ANCA's PIN WONDERWALL show. it finished today, and was a huge sell-out, red dots everywhere like the plague. There were fabulous pieces, by 70-odd artists.

This lot are called 'Phat Groovers', and they're made from vinyl record shards and rhinestones:



They're an edition of ten, and I think about six are sold. Don't try smashing records at home, kids! Vinyl doesn't smash, it has to be bent & it shatters. I'm still finding little unusable shards around my studio...

And this is a one-off, made from a vintage belt buckle and a piece of video tape (with a single rhinestone around the back). It's called 'Pretty Woman', because that's the movie I used. It sold too! Yay.

Putting it out there

Dear Jemal Sharah,

I would like to use your poem 'Revelation' for a letterpress broadside.

I have looked for you everywhere. I have written to your publishers, who say the rights have reverted back to you. I have googled you, found where you worked a year ago (Dili, Timor), tried to email you (it bounced back), emailed a colleague who might work near you (again, bounced back), so wrote to you via your employer (a very large government agency), but the letter came back with 'whereabouts unknown' on it. I have asked around, since you are very connected to Canberra, even found someone who has rented your house, but they do not know how to contact you directly.

I do not want to give up. All I can do is make the broadside, fully acknowledge you and the volume from which the poem comes, and hope that you surface and contact me to get your rightful dues: a fee, or a copy of the broadside, or a mix of both.

I will try to make it beautiful, and if it's any consolation, I won't be making any money from it, as it's being printed to raise money for a good cause.

Cheers,

&Duck

Postscript:

I love blogging. Jemal found me, we got in touch, I'm printing the broadside with a clear conscience. Results! Thank you, interwebs.

Head space

"Thursday. I never could quite get the hang of Thursdays."

"I remember. I remember. I remember everything."

I had lots of time to sit and muse yesterday. I won't call it 'thinking' because it was too scattered. I spent a lot of time sitting around in strange, busy, lonely places as I ferried a friend from her Aged Care Facility (you just can't call it a Home) to a hospital bed.

Nothing too serious, just intervention.

Before I left I'd been stuffing my head and heart with Paul Kelly's How to Make Gravy. On the way I stopped at my post office box and discovered the latest Meanjin, which I threw in my bag. You can't do that with a digital file.

Before the intervention, I'd tried to read her some new poetry by a poet I'd met in NZ, Brian Turner. He's a fab bugger, deeply entrenched in the heart of the southern island and its landscape. He writes poems that can rant like Lear on the moor and then go quiet so that you have to lean in. At his most succinct he does this:

Sky

If the sky knew half
of what we're doing
down here

it would be stricken,
inconsolable,
and we would have

nothing but rain*

(My friend Pete and I like it so much, we have just received permission to make it into a broadside.)

I'd read a few poems to her, but quickly realised that she was incapable of taking in new material. So I turned to her own writing, and read her a poem from 70 years ago.

That's good. Who was that?

You.

Oh, good.

It was good. I read them to her for a while, sticking to the ones that had background pictures for her to focus upon.

Later I wrangled her wheelchair with one hand, the other arm stuffed with supplies, and took her to the local (private) hospital, where we (I tag-teamed with another friend, and we negotiated our kids around her) waited over five hours for a drip to be connected to rehydrate her. She lay quietly on her side, full of mental pictures that I'd provided that she'd provided. I read Meanjin.

It's lovely when thoughts in your head collide with thoughts on the page.

Twenty... no, twenty-five years ago I had a friend who dressed as Paul Kelly. I remember when he walked back through my door, short back & sides with a slight quiff at the front, faded blue jeans, check shirt. He/we were so inspired by Kelly's music that it was the soundtrack to our constantly briefly-shared lives. I made my first adult trip to Melbourne to join him for a PK concert, then we walked the streets of Melbourne to his door, where he discovered his mattress out on the street because he hadn't paid the rent. He charmed his way back into the house, and we lay on his floor on the bare mattress for two days, full of Randwick Bells. We used to meet irregularly, in leaps and bounds. There were always others, and we never quite made anything work properly, but he was a major player in my 20s, as is Paul Kelly, and for that I'll always be grateful.

That's the way I remember it, he may have different memories. He's still in Melbourne.

I have rediscovered the tape deck on my studio stereo. I pushed my way into the back of my garden shed and dug out my old mix tapes. There's a lot of them, each with vestigal titles but the essential date of when I made them. They are mental time capsules, full of time bombs. Paul Kelly discusses the making of such tapes. So does Christos Tsiolkas in Meanjin. I thought a lot about music mixes and mental states yesterday.

I have moved to CD mixes over the last 15 years, and I still make them and date them, even though my ipod is easier to mix. I like the trace of thought and feeling. I need hard copy, even though you can't connect with them unless you have the equipment to play them. I wish I could make art like I make music mixes.


I had my annual asthma attack last night. Hospitals are stressful places, even when the patient is not in danger. I sat up late/early in my loungeroom, coughing uncontrollably, chest aching from the spasms. I read Pollyanna, which isn't as good as Anne of Green Gables for inspiring reassurance, but it was there.

Today I'm making a music mix. Here's what is on it, and I'm not justifying or rationalising any of them:





Don't get all psychological on me, it's just a head space.






*Brian Turner, from Just This (Wellington, NZ: Victoria University Press, 2009), winner of the 2010 New Zealand Post Book Awards. Do not reproduce past this point.

PRINTing BIG

I keep talking obliquely about printing big and my upcoming exhibition with Megalo. I started really getting motivated today, and decided to document my progress in the same way I did for my NZ residency.



So: a bit of context. Megalo, our fabulous, unique, community-enlivening Canberra print access studio, is moving premises, from its current (shared) location in Watson at the old Watson High School site to a very prominent heritage site in Kingston that will enhance its position in the local arts community: a short walk from the National Gallery and right next door to the Canberra Glassworks and the Bus Depot Markets.

On the weekend after next (15/16/17), the National Gallery of Australia is having its annual printmaking symposium, with the theme of MATERIALITY. If you're interested in any kind of printmaking, it's going to be a good thing to attend. Anyhoo, Megalo has the opportunity to use its new building before the actual move, and so is putting on a gala print exhibition in conjunction with the symposium, and it's called PRINTBIG. Artists taking part have had some teaching connection with Megalo: GW Bot, Robert Boynes, Julian Laffan, Mike Parr & John Loane, Annie Trevillian, Minigraff, Surya Bajracharya, Liam Garstang, and myself.



There's a reason why it's called PRINTBIG: we are all producing printworks to be installed, mounted or printed onto walls that are 3.6 x 3.6 metres or 4.8 x 3.6 metres in dimension... eek! When I was invited, I was only a week or so from leaving for New Zealand, and I didn't have much time to think deeply, so my first instinct was to pick up the phone and ring my friend and casual collaborator, byrd, who scales up his work on a daily basis. I asked him if he'd do s formal collaboration with me.

Often my first gut impulses can be wacky, more often they are quite insightful in ways that I hadn't first realised. In this case, I sat down after the first rush of adrenalin and thought about working with byrd on a wallpiece. I also thought about why I was asked to participate in the first place -- I mean, I'm a book artist. I work quite small scale. I had a show at Megalo last year in which I used the space in an interesting way, and maybe that is what gave Alison (head honcho of Megalo) the idea that I could work with a large space here.

I love collaborating with people, whether they are present or absent -- I know that last word sounds strange, but when I work with text I don't just take the text and mould it into my shape; I research the writer, think about what they're saying, and try to enhance it or pair it with something sympatico, and if they have/had strong opinions, I work with them. If it's a full-blown collaboration, with full participation of all parties, there's a dance that you do to give and take your wants and desires with theirs (this is what I'm talking about at the print symposium, amongst other things). In the case of byrd, I need his experience with scale, and I wanted this to be more than just him helping my upscale my work. I wanted a FULL collaboration.

I rang a poet friend who lives in Qld, Angela Gardner (who is also a printmaker) and asked her if she had any spare words about, say, chaos or destruction, or societal breakdown or something similarly chunky and interesting. Angela is constantly writing interesting things, and I knew that she'd be up for a bit of textual wallplay. She sent me a long unpublished series of chunks about architecture, and right at the end there was a fabulous bit called Demolition, which I knew was perfect for gelling the wee scraps of idea in my head. Angela was originally going to come down for the symposium and have a play during the installation, but she's had to cancel, so we're just going to pretend she's standing behind us when we're working.


That's my pile of 'sketches', working out what the text means to me, and rough ideas of what I want to text to do. Byrd is doing his own undoubtedly more artistic sketches, of the imagery he and I will create together alongside and amidst the text.

I'm treating our wall as a page spread of a giant book, like a big textual billboard. I'm taking the words of a poet and using an artist to help me bring them to life. That's what I do with books and broadsides, and that's what I'm doing here, and that's how I'm rationalising working at this scale (so that I don't panic).

I did some printing in Dunedin on the last night of my residency, using their wonderful large woodtype letters, and some of their fabulous brown paper (that is so much better than anything I've found in Australia). I've got various bits of brown paper around the studio, and I posted back to myself all the brown paper lunchbags that the college gave me for lunches during my residency. And now I'm using my wood type to print the words I need.







I'm printing a few copies of everything, and working from the top down. It's a very organic process; I'm squeezing as much onto the paper as I can, and will tear down once they're dry. I'm working with the words in a loosely concrete style, using hand-rolling the paper surface to create meaningful texture, such as in the word breakages.



Angela has, bless her, given us complete creative freedom with the text, so the formatting is totally up to me. I have given byrd complete creative freedom with my layout, and we'll be using collaged overprints, stencilling and graffiti spray to hopefully make it come alive.



The trickiest thing about this project is that we only have one night to install. The cubes (each artist in PRINTBIG has a side of a huge plywood cube to work with) won't be build until the afternoon/evening of the 14th of October, and the media launch of the show is on the morning of the 15th. So we're pre-preparing as much as we can, but it will be a big night, working in situ to get the piece finished. Which in itself is apt, since a chunk of the (visual aspect of the) work is about the scuttle of street artists to get into a fresh site at night before it disappears or gets totally worked over.

More photos (ongoing) here. I will try to keep documenting this, but as you can see, there's a LOT to do. It's scary, but this is to date one of the most exciting projects I've worked on.

PRINTBIG is only up for three days. If you can get to it, do... there will be live projection works, fabulous installed art (cross fingers) and also an audience participation piece, making Australia's largest monoprint, right over the weekend. Doesn't it sound terrific?

Basking in the light

Guess what I've been doing tonight?

PRINTING THE LAST POSTER. Well, not the last print of the last poster, but I'm now editioning the last of the seven images. And then I have to print the title page and colophon, so there's still over 250 pages to pull, but YAY nonetheless. I'm aiming to pull the last wet print on Sunday, maybe Monday at the latest, because we want them snug inside their folios and ready to launch by the Thursday afternoon at the Otakou Press wayzgoose.

The second-last one was tricky. Each poet had sent me a choice of poems, and I selected them not only by whether I liked them (because, I have to say, I liked all of them in different ways) but also by whether they would work on a wall. Because some poems are better in the hand, or in the heart, but not on your office/bedroom/loungeroom wall.

Michael Harlow is a local poet -- he doesn't live in Dunedin, but they claim him as theirs, especially when he comes second-up in the NZ Post Book Awards (it was won by Brian Turner, who is also local, and is a past Otakou Press poet). He's also a practicing Jungian psychotherapist, which, when I was told, put the fear of Ceiling Cat into me. The pressure to understand! To make the poster MEAN something! ARGHHH!

I kept putting his poem, The Piano's Birthday, aside; then I thought that I'd better not leave it for last, so tackled it after I finished Sarah Holland-Batt's poem. The few poems that MH had sent me were lovely, but not WALL, except this one, which at least had some visual triggers in terms of colour. Bear with me, I will show you the poem, but I just want to talk about the process for a mo before I show you the outcome.

I looked at it, and looked at it, and felt lost. It seemed dense and loaded, but accessible if I could find an 'in'. I decided to google the term 'marjatta tree' as it seemed to be the most obvious clue.

Lo, there is no such thing as a Marjatta tree, but there is a Marjatta, who is the heroine of a Finnish legend. She was a virgin who became pregnant after swallowing a mysterious talking whortleberry [!!!] and she gave birth in a stable to a God-like child who went on to achieve Finnish world dominance. So, a Finnish Christmas tale, I guess. SYMBOLIC!

And that's when my brain imploded and the poem opened up to me. I don't claim to understand it completely, but it became clear that it was a piece about inspiration and creation, and that there was two completely separate parts to the poem: the first, which is about raw KA-BOOM creative energy, leaping out of foreheads and fighting out of wombs using whortleberries and so forth. The second part is much quieter, and more about inspiration, about hearing and seeing and thinking and being moved, ever so gently, so write a Poem.

Then I was thinking about the colours he'd given me: green and red, and I was thinking about adding some blue somewhere, when Donald-the-Special-Collections-Librarian, seeing me fiddling and leaping and fistpumping and puzzling, offered to show me the facsimile copy of Jung's Red Book that Michael Harlow had donated to the library. Oh OH OH! That's when it all fell into place.





Jung made this incredible dream diary, and decorated it like a medieval illuminated manuscript, and the text is black, with three dominant colours for the decorative elements: red, green and blue.

BINGO.



Goodness me, it was a finicky print to edition. I was printing four colours in each pull of the press, and if I vagued out at any point, I'd miss a bit and stuff up the print. Like this:



when I forgot to ink up the green bit. And this:



when I forgot to ink up the bottom black block. GAH.

This is when music is very important. You need to be in the moment, following a routine, not thinking about anything except the print and whatever music is playing. The music needs to be familiar, but not so much so that it puts you in a trance. If there's nothing to think about, you go into a trance. There needs to be a lyric or two to chew over while you check your work. On this vein, I'd like to thank Laura Cantrell for her newish album Trains and Boats and Planes, especially her most excellent cover of Gordon Lightfoot's The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. It did very well in the role of editioning aid.

It took all weekend to get the print printed. I did some other things: on Friday night we had the opening of Donald-TSCL's marvellous exhibition of Pulp Fiction, where we were all asked to nominate our favorite titles from the show. I'm torn between Slay-ride for Sandra and Tall, Dark and Dead. The covers are amazing, and Donald-TSCL has managed to source a few process pieces, where you can see the photo of the nude model, the drawings of her, and then the finished cover. This is going to be a very popular exhibition, more so than the ALL ABOARD Railway collection exhibition that just came down...

After 3 glasses of exquisite Otago white, I stumbled into town with my Australian librarian friend Allison and we caught the latest cinematic offering from Flight of the Conchords' Jermaine Clement, Predicament. It won't be a smash hit, but I can see it getting a gentle cult following, and has some very good moments of hilarity.



I also had another couple of hours playing European board games with Allison and other librarian types on Saturday, flexing the skills I'd picked up a few weeks before to come equal second in Alhambra. w00t!

Now I'm working on the final piece bar the title and colophon pages: Robert Adamson's poem The Sibyl's Avenue, chosen because it has a cat in it, which makes the folio complete. You can't have a print folio without a cat, peoples!



I wanted to use some of the fabulous ornamental blocks that they have in abundance here, and found one that suits bird chitter:



It's a lovely calligraphic flourish (guaranteed to make Ronnie moan more than usual in the comments :) ).

And the cat chitter? Check this out:



I've never seen anything like it; most ornaments have confident design lines, but this one is deliciously wobbly and warbling. It just looks like the noise my cats make when they're trying to talk bird. Wonderful.



And this print definitely holds the touch of the maker, as I'm using my finger to ink up the bird 'footprints', as it's the only way to get them fading out as they're supposed to.

Goodness. I also entertained a posse of schoolboys with their teacher this afternoon, from Otago Boys High. At least one of them was fully engaged, which made it fun.

Tomorrow I'm doing a live interview on Channel 9, the local television station! It's a show called Dunedin Diary, and the producer said today that I'm only being interviewed for 5 and a half minutes, so feel free to talk as fast as I like... I don't think she realises the speeds at which I can reach when I'm excited and nervous.

It's funny, standing not quite at the end of the tunnel but clearly seeing the light. Best Beloved and Bumblebee are flying over on Saturday night, and taking their time to get to me, arriving in Dunedin on Tuesday to hang out for a while before we start travelling around the south island for a couple of weeks.

I haven't mentioned them much... Best Beloved has been living up to his name, doing a fantastic job as a single parent. He's wrangled Bumblebee through a load of accelerated homework (so that he can take 3 weeks off school) and kept the cats from fretting too much. I can't thank him enough for holding things together while I came here. I couldn't have done this without him.

OK, time to turn off the radio -- I listen to it as a break from my personal playlist, and I've kept it on the position on the dial at which I found it, which is a local commercial station I've lately dubbed INXS FM because they play at least 4 INXS tracks a day, consciously or not -- and head back to my digs to flake out on the couch with my feet high in the air. I've just finished reading Jude the Obscure on my iPhone (which almost made me break out weeping in the dining room of the college over my bowl of fruit and yogurt), and am halfway through Mary Stewart's The Crystal Cave (something I dug out of the college library, which is a weird mix of donated Classics and abandoned airport novels). Life is tough...

Rolling along

So. Week four, and I'm on schedule, I think. I've printed 5 posters, and two of those have been double layer printings, so that's at least 700 pulls of the press already.



The folio cases are being made at the University Bindery this week. I've been overprinting all the poster images on a few sheets and they're going to be cut into strips and inlaid on the front of the cases. That's another reason why I love this place... they still have a university bindery.

I'm lying on the couch in my flat, listening to the wind howling outside my window. We had a couple of beautiful days, quite warm with no rain, and then today the rain came back, the temperature dropped, and the wind started up. There might be snow, who knows? It doesn't bother me, I'm in t-shirts in the warm studio, looking out at the world through the big glass window. Last week I watched a line of children leaving the museum carrying sleeping bags, having just had a sleepover there. On Sunday I glanced out from my work and witnessed a Haka ritual:



Why do I need to go anywhere? But I do get out. I got some crazy op shop bargains, two colourful light merino jumpers (one red, one purple) for $8... one was $5, and the other was half price for $3! My feet have been killing me, so I went looking for some Crocs (fabulous for all-day standing on concrete, as I may have mentioned before, and much safer for clumsy sorts like me than tripping on rubber mats) and I found a pair for $6! Happy feet, happy Duck. Within half a day of wearing them, my feet stopped complaining. Bliss. I do only wear them in the studio, though.

Anyhoo, I was going to show you some work. Here goes:

When I last left you (apart from the last post, which jumped forward a bit), I'd printed the first layer of the Vincent O'Sullivan river poem



and perhaps the first layer of the Stephen Edgar poem, Sight Reading...



With the Edgar poem, I'd found boxes of a fabulous outline font, very carnivalesque (is that a word?), with solid letters and outline letters that could overprint, and I knew I had to find a way to use them.



Edgar's poem is all about potential, and ability, and confidence, and strangeness, and... lots of things, but the visual image he provides is one of floating text, and the keyword for me was sunset. So my first layer was in pinky red, and then I added a second layer of orange and black:



to make:



I kept thinking about whether to use found text, or to just randomly pull letters from the box and arrange them, but in the end, after wandering around holding the poem loosely in my head (which is something I do a lot, because I have a dreadful memory for words, but the sense of things lingers, especially visually), I hit upon the phrase YOU WILL ALWAYS WONDER, and I used it all through the print. I like to think that people will discover it in the print at some point, and it will extend the reading slightly.

That print wasn't a hard one to set up and print, but it was laborious, especially with the two print runs.

The next one, Vincent O'Sullivan's river poem (it has no title), but excruciatingly tricky. For one thing, getting the second layer of colour to work with the first was hard, as I have no scales, and can't mix colour accurately. Took me over an hour to get the colour right. And then there was the layout:









It was like doing a jigsaw puzzle. And even once I'd got it all set up, a lot of it wasn't working properly because the wood type I was using was so old and worn, it needed to be packed up a lot.

I'd hoped to get it all printed by Sunday night, but I spent Saturday faffing with it, and then I went to see the bands, and I spent the rest of the night dreaming about rolling it up. I woke up on Sunday determined to resolve it. So I mixed a stiffer ink for the text (silver and black, to make a dark silver), and I changed the layout a bit to make rolling easier, and then I rolled up my sleeves and got stuck into it.

I did finish it on Sunday night. Late Sunday night.







I'm happy with it. I wanted watery, I wanted elegant, plus churchy and bridal without being saccharine. I think I got there. It's very subtle, and a lot of its printing is embossed as well as inked, so you have to hold it and shift it around to get the full effect.

Then it was time to pull it all apart, make another frisket,



and start on another one. I gave a little taster of it this morning, because my last big post about printing was reposted on Spike the Meanjin blog, and I thought I'd better have something printy online at the top of my posts.

This poem, by Sarah Holland-Batt, has a dark, dreamy mood to it, which I wanted to convey visually. I decided to try some more freehand rolling, straight on to the paper, which gives a very velvety feel to the colour, a plum colour meant to evoke squid inkiness.

But! first I had to adjust the platen of the Columbian, which was listing rather badly to one end... I asked the magical Library Custodian (that's what they call the helping background staff: the tea ladies {yes, they also still have those}, the maintenance and cleaning people) if he had any WD-40, and lo! he did, even though no-one else, including Donald-the-Special-Collections-Librarian, knew what I was talking about.


Have tools, can wrangle bolts.



I have a wonderful book, belonging to the library, about printing with the iron handpress, and it goes into a long and complicated explanation about making the platen straight that involves pressure tests with little tags of mylar etc. I don't have time for that, so I used a spirit level. It's now not perfect, but it's close to perfect and it took ten minutes.

Back to Night Sonnet.



Having straightened the platen, I then try to print a forme that has an extra amount of pressure in one corner... doh. I was embossing the title and the wooden O (to make a moon) so that I could hand-roll ink over the top and make the embossing POP. Unfortunately, if I embossed hard enough to make the moon pop, everything couldn't print clearly. So I compromised, and made it a dark moon, with outlines only, which works with the surreal musing of the poem.



Excuse the tatty header on that example... it's what happens if the roller hasn't got enough ink on it: it gets sticky and pulls the fluffy paper apart rather than depositing ink. You only do it once (or twice).

It was such a gloriously easy print to do once I got the pressure working: one colour, good easy rolling with no overlaps on the press, a couple of strokes with the roller on the bench, and done. I got the whole edition done at a leisurely pace today, and now I'm onto poster 6.

I'll leave you with a photo and a link.


I can't believe this man could get to GG with a name like that. I wonder if he collects Hardy Boys novels?

Also: you have to see this. It's the best LOLcat link EVER.

Taster

Here's a quick peek at what I'm working on today.















Yes, I know I've missed out on two whole posters, but I'll try to sit down tonight and write coherently about this latest batch of three...