Requests for CATZ

Man, this is harder than I expected. How many times a day do I think 'I must blog that' and then just Facebook it? I guess it's the actual sitting down to compose something, tracking down the photos I want to use, resizing them, and all that.

I've had a few requests for more cats. I presume that means more cat photos, but I seriously almost took a cat home from the recent Bega Show. She was GORGEOUS, black and white and fluffy but not too fluffy. Her name was Emma, but we would have changed that pretty quickly. I mean, we couldn't have Mr Padge, Mr Pooter and Emma, could we? She would have to be a Ms or Miss at the very least, and probably have to have a similarly 'Diary of a Nobody' name, like Daisy Muttler or something. She was 6 months old, desexed, micro-chipped, toilet-trained and completely mellow around all the kids and adults patting her in the animal pavilion. I fell in love. We've always wanted three cats, but we've never been sure about how to go about it. It would be easier if our two cats weren't litter siblings and completely co-dependent.

I didn't end up taking Emma home. Best Beloved was also tempted when he met her, but he has a slightly clearer head than I and he, unbeknownst to me until that conversation, had worked out a strategy and so unveiled it for me: wait until one of our cat-boys dies and then buy two cats to fill the gaping hole that will be left. I found the thought almost too painful to hold for even a few minutes, but he has a good point. The remaining cat will be so bereft and lonely that he will welcome the company, and with any luck he'll be too old to put up much of a fight against two new kittens.

I suppose I should put some photos in now. Speaking of one cat, Pooter very rarely seems to be in front of my camera. Padge, however, is always in the studio under or beside my feet.

 I love his big bum, it's such a lovely catty shape.

It does however make it hard to sit on small seats. All ladies with generous proportions (like myself) know this pain.


Let's change the subject, it's making me sad.


I'm very excited about a couple of new albums out or coming out. The first is the new David Bowie album, the first for YEARS. I'm not much of a hero worshipper, but if I had to pick one person I admire it would be him, just because he has proved himself to be a continually inventive person who comes up with the goods. I love the latest single from the album (The Stars (are out tonight)), mainly because it is damn fine and has a video clip with Tilda Swinton and David being bizarre together, but also because it will soon be released on WHITE VINYL, peoples. I am going to queue for one if I have to, and it will join my red Beatles vinyl and my pale pink Elvis vinyl (yes, Colonel Duck, both of which were/are yours. But this will be MINE).

The other album, which I have already and have been playing on high rotation, is the latest from Deborah Conway and Willy Zeigler, Stories of Ghosts. How many ways do I love Deborah Conway? She has always been there; every time she releases a track it's in tune with my own time of life and emotions. I guess we're roughly the same age, give or take five years or so. As a forty-something woman (entering the latter part of '40-something' :) ), when I heard the track 'Nothing Tastes the Same' on ABC RN, it had the same emotional impact as 'Man Overboard' did when I was 18.

She and Willy have been given a lot of airplay on ABC RN lately, (and so they bloody well should) and they've been pitching the album as an atheistic exploration of Old Testament themes. But it's more than that. The CD cover and printed song-words (the material object!) reveal an underlying preoccupation with questioning the treatment of Jewish people through history. It's done beautifully; the music and the lyrics are just wonderful. The songs are so multi-layered that I'm sure people can find multiple readings that are all equally valid.


I've got a couple of my graduate residencies in swing at the moment. One is Merryn Sommerville, who is working with woodcuts and wood type. I'll show more of her soon. The other, who is almost finished, is Eadie Newman. Eadie studied in the Printmedia & Drawing Workshop and came out more as a drawer than a printer, but I loved the way she combines her drawings with imaginative and elaborate titles. So she came and looked at the type, and like the resident before her, painter Louise Upshall, proved to be a dab hand at type-setting. Here she is:

She wasn't quite sure what to do, so I sent her home with a book of Stevie Smith poems (I love matching artistic minds with the right texts) and she came up with this for the poem 'In My Dreams':

Isn't it wonderful? Of course, that image is just the proof, but we've now printed them and after a session of cleaning them up and signing, they will be unleashed on my website for sale, along with all the other wonderful prints made by my EASS residents (EASS is an emerging artists' support scheme run by my art school). Later in the year, in August, I'm putting up an exhibition of all the work made so far. I'll keep you all informed of that one.

 If you're in Melbourne, pop over to the Caulfield campus of Monash and see the most wonderful print exhibition, called Community and Context, up until March 12. If you can't get to it, you can at least look at the catalogue, and maybe even buy one. I'm in it, and so are a lot of very interesting people.

Enough! My email inbox is pinging madly; I'm in the thick of curating an exhibition of artist's books made by Canberra artists, opening April 11. I'm guessing the next post will be all about that.

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.

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.

Game Over, dudes

Yesterday Natalie, my excellent studio resident, and I sat down and scanned the fruits of her labour. How's this for eye-popping?



I've just written a couple of posts about the student residency itself and Natalie's working process, and put the posters up at my Duckshop, which is where you can buy much of my work, and now the work of people who make things with me. Fun! If you can think of anyone who would like to support Natalie's work by buying or promoting these broadsides, please spread the word.



So. Next I need to finish my Book Art Object edition, make solid plans for my NZ experience, teach a few workshops (Megalo, Tuggeranong Arts Centre, Book Studio Winter Typography School. If you'd like info about any of these, head to my website) and organise Peter's broadside residency. Amongst other, more domestic things that need to be done. Is that enough to be going on with? I think so...

Coming soon

Coming soon to the Ampersand Duck website: four broadsides by my student resident Natalie Azzopardi. She's been working hard, splitting the one ration of Fabriano Rosapina paper into smaller piles so that she could work on a few different designs and allow herself to play with my orsum (the way I hear my son say it) equipment.

She's built up a 'Game Over' theme, and all of these figures have been painstakingly handset from individual metal type ornaments. The Mario broadside is particularly hard to reproduce, because his face and hands are embossed rather than printed with ink.

Aren't they cool? We're scanning them today, and they'll soon be up for sale on my website for $50 each plus postage and handling. These photos are just taken with my phone camera, so the scans should really make the colours pop.

Next resident, Peter McLean, will start working either in July, before I go to NZ, or October, when I get back from NZ. Either way, I can't wait to see what he does -- he's a printmaker who loves type and wood engraving, so I think his work will be a little bit more traditional than Natalie, who is a photographer who dabbles so well in the book arts & print that I think she should keep her practice broad and papery :)

Swash capital

I can hear a river, running hard behind me. There are urgent voices discussing something in a language I can't understand. I seem to have a fur hat on. The river is loud, and getting louder. The voices just don't stop. My hat is hot. I put my hand up to adjust it, maybe take it off, and it uncurls and stomps on my face.

I wake. The cat jumps off the bed. It's dark, but the sound of the river persists. I'm not sure if it's really heavy rain, the sort that I'd driven through very slowly the day before, or if it's actually a river. But I'm at home, of course it couldn't be a river.

The voices are still urgent, and I still can't understand them. I sit up in bed and look out the window at the street. I can hear the water, but until I reach for my glasses, I can't quite make out what is happening. Has the street flooded again?

Sort of. Once I got up, and staggered down to the other end of the house, I pieced together the weird scraps of information. The water main on one side of the corner on which our house sits had exploded, or at least burst, and was gushing enormous quantities of water out onto the road, which was then rushing past our window into the nearest stormwater drain. Our verge is awash, muddy water swashing all over the road. Some Asian neighbours, out for a midnight stroll, as they often do (thankfully!), have rung ACTEW, the local water people, and are standing on our corner, watching the amazingly shameful waste of water and chatting urgently to each other. It is about 1:30am.

Best Beloved, always aware of our culinary needs, checks our tap water and finds it sluggish, so fills a number of plastic bottles in case we're cut off for a long time. I could never have thought of that; I'm sitting in my undies & singlet, watching through the loungeroom window in the dark, fascinated by the sound of the water.

Suddenly a couple of monster trucks roar up and mount the kerb and our driveway. Flashing lights, beeping noises, men huddled in groups: everything activates and gains urgency. BB dons a dressing gown and goes out to see if there's anything we have to do. We're told to go back to sleep if we can, but there'll be a bit of noise throughout the night, and they start ripping up the footpath near the gushing.

We do our best to sleep, despite the truck noises, the water rumble and the seemingly persistent voices of our neighbours, who seem to want to stay and witness the event all night.

The next morning I am woken by the sound of the truck driving off; the silence is deafening. I go outside, and all I can see is mud, and tire-tracks. It wasn't a dream.





The gum tree on our corner has had the watering of its life, and will probably double in size this year!




The Gym

To my surprise, I'm managing to get to the gym twice a week, but it's still early days yet because uni hasn't gone back. I'm hoping not only to maintain a biweekly visit, but add some sort of class to get my aerobic fitness up. I'm happy with my progress so far; I realize that I'm never going to be willowy slim, and my upper arms are never going to whittle down from their slab-like peasant appearance so they might as well be firmer, and I can see the improvement already. Plus my neck and back are feeling stronger, which is very important for my pain management, especially if I want to keep using heavy drawers of type in my art practice.

The thing that keeps me amused at the gym -- a very important component to keep me going -- is watching all the 'gym faces': the wild grimaces that people make as they lift something heavy. I can't decide if they're doing it to be seen (many strut around to make sure you can see them before they start) or they think that no-one is watching. Either way, it's hell-a-fun, to quote Cartman.



Starting School

I'm really proud of Bumblebee, he weathered the first week of high school very well, coping with the complete paradigm shift like a trooper.



He's trying to look confident here, on the morning of his first day, but he still looks a bit nervous. Check out the size of his feet, ay ay ay...

He's got a teacher he adores (o wot joy, it's a science teacher!), a teacher he can't stand, which is always a great foil and takes the heat off the other teachers; he loves the fact that they have a dedicated year 7 quadrangle, and he finds the varied classrooms and period times makes it easier to focus his mind on the relevant classes.

Phew! How happy am I? They've already had their school photo, and they've got vaccinations and camp coming up before the end of Feb. I'm starting back at uni in a couple of weeks, and then we'll all be focused on study, since BB has started a Masters in something governmental. I'm in the early days of considering a PhD, so it may be that next year will be even more intense than this one, but we'll see...


Duckling

Last week I had the first proper studio visit by one of my studio residency winners, Natalie. She came armed with ideas and once we'd discussed some of the practical considerations, she got right down to work:



It's early days yet, but here's a sneak peek at her efforts so far:



Yee-haw! This is going to be fun.




Watching


BB took advantage of our first child-free weekend today and saw Precious, which was quite an intense experience. BB always gets excited about cats in movies -- we have a family rule that a movie is extra-good if there's a cat in it -- and got grumpy with me when I told him that I thought the cats were there as a metaphor for the selfishness of Precious' mother and to highlight the fact that she could care for cats more than her own flesh and blood.

"But they were such lovely cats," was all he could say.

I'm a bit sad that he didn't come to see Bright Star with Bernice and I, because it has a wonderful cat called Topper who almost steals the show.

Tomorrow I am going to up the intensity by going to see The Road. I love that book so much that I am a bit nervous about the film; will it match my inner vision of it? I'll let you know...

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.