A pretext for moving along

I think I've come to terms that this blog is over. It was a fantastic way to meet people and talk about my thoughts and processes, but I seem to be channeling that sort of thing in other directions now.

I've started a PhD at the University of Canberra, looking at poetry and print technologies and artists' books, which is a delightfully useless topic to be exploring in this particular political climate, when there is a hard push for everything to be vocational. Heh, I guess this stuff is my vocation, so all I can do is forge ahead.

[2023: this following bit never actually happened, but I'm hoping to get something like it up sometime, will add the link here when it does] As part of my research, I've started a new website/blog thing called PRETEXT. It aims to be a one-stop resource of weblinks, reference materials, primary sources such as re-published catalogue texts that are out of print, and new writings by people who are at the coalface of book arts in Australia and New Zealand. I launched it in January, and it’s having a slow and steady start, but as the momentum builds I hope that people (YOU) start to interact with it: leave comments, start discussions, send me information, write words for it. It covers the whole spectrum of book making and processes that lead to books, like binding, papermaking and printmaking. I’m interested in all forms of book-making that step sideways from the mainstream publishing industry. They all need to be explored and supported and above all, discussed. I’m attempting to build up a proper living and pulsing picture of what is happening in Australia right now, and of what happened in the last 4 decades up  to now, so that when people want to know about our regional condition, as I do now, the information is freely there, to be worked and reworked to our mutual advantage. [end of following bit]  

Thanks so much for reading me and talking to me over the years. I'm still putting stuff on www.ampersandduck.com (new website), mostly practice-related. I think I'm all talked out about my personal life, but you can never say never :)

I'll leave you with a photo of Padge, wearing his happy face. Remember to breathe x

 
Hello from the future! During that time no-one talks about anymore (whispers: Covid), I began writing posts again in a new blog. Then I tried Substack a bit later and it left me completely cold with its relentless attempts to monetise. So I am back at Blogger with utterly infrequent writings! See you there if you feel so inclined.

Moving right along

What a couple of weeks! The 100% Books exhibition is going fabulously well, looks superb and by all accounts is inspiring a new wave of artist book making in the region. Win win! It finishes this Sunday, so if you haven't been yet (and are capable of going), don't miss out. I'm working on a web presence for it on my 'working' site so that it can have an afterlife and will have downloadable bits for those who want to know more about it. I will be in the gallery on Saturday afternoon from 12 to 4, hosting the last of our three white-gloves sessions. Here's a peek at the gallery (there's more behind the camera scope too).

Another thing to share is the lovely Lady Duck, talking to the ABC about her spiritual home, the Bega Regional Museum. I keep watching it and smiling at the last 'imagine the scene' bit, which is very 'her' and gives you an idea of how I came to be me.

I have been working very hard on the initial thinking of my PhD study, and my main conclusion is that I don't have enough office space. We have a room in the house that used to be the last owner's sewing room. It has a desk that wraps around two sides of the room, long enough for all three of us to sit at with our laptops and work. We built floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on the other two sides of the room, all full now, of course. My corner is now piled with books and bits of paper that flow down onto the floor, creating a low wall across the floor to delineate my space. It's only going to get worse, and I am determined not to flow into my studio, which is full enough with bits of paper and books. Blimey, what to do? I'll have to gently force BB and B out and make them use their computers on their laps :)

Must get back to it...  *waves*

Hello, it's been a while hasn't it?

I'm still alive, thrashing my way through jungles of Henry Lawson, deserts of proposal-writing and bogs of tax.

Just thought I'd give you something to look at while I finish it all up.

Best. Link. Eva.
KTHXBAI

My goodness

Forgive me lovelies, it's been far too long since my last confession post. I do think about posting, but then I get back to whatever I was doing and vow to catch up later. The last few weeks have been so busy. And then yesterday the whole 'busy' excuse got ramped up to 'emergency panic' status as a number of projects that had been ticking along in the 'one day I'll get it to you' category all landed on my doorstep to be done ASAP. So here I am, writing to you while my Book class do their own projects, between helping them with their problems, because once I get home there will be NO time to blog.

In the meantime, I've had a few little adventures, like the day my iPhone fell out of my bag while cycling in a tipsy manner and I found it a few hours later by retracing my route, only to discover that it had fallen on the road and had been repeatedly run over by cars. It was lying in a little pool of glass, as sprayed as blood, and would quite obviously never work again. NOOOOOOOOOOOOO was my first reaction, and panic as I thought of how much information was on it, and how I hadn't backed up for (thankfully only) a day or so.

But then I went to my phone provider and did a new contract that involved slightly more money and a much newer iPhone, and now I'm all 'that old thing, tuh'. No grief, just wonder at how much technology has improved since the iPhone 3. Yay!

Bumblebee found a beautiful flower to hang around with, and they are now like Siamese twins, connected at the hip when in each other's presence, and by non-stop telephonery when not. He's discovering what it's like when someone REALLY digs you, rather than just merely likes you, and he's totally hooked.

I have been busy in my studio, printing and planning and making, plus teaching at Megalo. This weekend I'll be taking the final week of the class promoted in my last post, showing the children how to sew their books together and make covers.

I think I've finally shaken the cold that has been bugging me since Easter, although it's still lingering a little bit. I'm seeing the doctor this week, just to make sure everything is hunky-dory.

Gym and I broke up, which is probably why I keep getting snotty, but he just put too much pressure on me, and he had weird friends that stared at inappropriate bits of my body. Now I go for hour-long fast morning walks around the border of our suburb, which takes me up around the base of Mt Majura, complete with rabbits, kangaroos and lots of birds. If I miss my walk, I don't think 'damn, I'm wasting money', which is much nicer than when I skipped gym. The walk makes me very happy, and my brain gets all juicy and creative, so that when I get back I'm raring to get into the studio.

I've seen a few movies, one of which was 'Iron Sky', a film so silly it's genuinely hilarious, about Nazis living on the dark side of the moon and trying to re-invade the Earth. It was made on a very low budget, and has to be seen with absolutely no expectations of quality. The piss-take of Sarah Palin is worth the price of admission alone. Bumblebee just didn't get it; I think you have to be an adult to understand the humour. I think it will be a cult movie eventually, it'll grow on people.

What else has been happening? My mind is a blank. All I can see is the print I'm working on at the moment back at my house, awaiting me. It's for a little show coming up in the Photospace Gallery at the ANU Art School to mark the Transit of Venus happening on 6 June. I had a simple idea, but it's turned into a complex process that's taken a lot more time than it should... and will look like a simple print. *sigh*

OK, I'll leave it there, but I will return soon, I hope. If not, imagine me buried under a pile of marked-up pages as I lay out the definitive scholarly edition of Henry Lawson's 'While the Billy Boils', which is what landed on my desk yesterday...

Charming.

Best Beloved has been away this week. He's gone off to northern America, skipping through various parts of the US and Canada for work. Most of it is meetings, but he gets a day here & there to see things, and he's an expert speed tourist, so he'll cram a lot into a day. Last weekend he went to the Getty Museum in LA, and last I heard was looking forward to the Smithsonian in Washington DC.

I took Bumblebee back to Colonel Duck's farm to see Lily the lamb, who is nice and fat these days.



The tree that they are sitting under is very typical of the area, it's an apple gum (I think, from memory) and they cover the slopes here. When the wind blows (and it blows A LOT), limbs come down, so I don't tend to spend a lot of time under them, having been emotionally scarred by poor Judy's death in my childhood.



Back at home again, there's been no real food in the fridge, since I've been away from the markets for two weekends and I don't count Woolworths as a provider of real food. Nearly every night has been a non-cooking night:

Monday I had to assess over 40 students for their complimentary courses of either book, etching or screenprinting (we three teachers combine as a panel and do all of our students together), so I was absolutely buggered and couldn't do anything but buy fish & chips.

Tuesday my lovely Dr Sista Outlaw was in town and staying with me while she attended (for her work) the opening of the National Museum of Australia's heartbreaking Inside exhibition. Her job at the moment is working on the NSW arm of the new Find and Connect website. So at the end of that day we went around to my local yumspot, Wilburs, and had pizza and wine (well, she drank, I'm off grog for the month or so) and caught up with Zoe.

Wednesday was a bit of a lost day, spending most of it with Dr SO and an old friend of hers, and then hosting my regular fortnightly scrabble-dumpling soiree. It's a great night: people bring packets of frozen dumplings and whatever they want to drink, and eventually we play scrabble, or not, or read poems, play chess, watch Spicks&specks, whatever the dynamic of the night wants to do, as the mix of people is always very different, depending who I've talked to that week or who gets brought along. This time we had a couple of fellows at the start, but they had to run off, so we ended up with seven women who all wanted to play scrabble and have a good natter at the same time, so we put two boards out and pooled all the letters and had a big single game. It was very civilised, really. You could choose either board in your turn, and both boards were used quite equally. Lots of dumplings steamed & eaten, lots of good conversation.

Thursday was again a not-studio day. I yearn for the studio, but sometimes it just has to wait its turn. I had to ride my bike into the city to meet up with the other people involved in the ArtsACT Artists-in-Schools Residency this year. I rode because most of the city was pretty chaotic with the visit by POTUS (or Barack Obama to you non-acronyming non-Canberrans) whom I completely missed seeing, because I'm never at the right moment at the right time for anything like that. I was in Bega when the Queen visited too. I did hear all the planes and helicopters yesterday, but that's as close as I got to the action. The meeting was great fun - we all got to tell stories of our early childhood teaching encounters and give feedback about the grant stuff.

After that I went home and did some intensive gardening, pulling out a small tree (I'd noticed the same tree in other people's gardens around the corner and NO WAY was I letting it get that big, ever) and doing lots of weeding.

Oh -- and throughout most of this activity was the ongoing stoooooory (in Muppet tones) of Bumblebee's homework. More like SAGA. He had has two major assignments due, and the first finally got done (it was like pulling teeth), with the second one more enthusiastically tackled when suddenly we discovered a THIRD one that had been forgotten and was a day overdue when remembered. ACTION STATIONS. We (WE) got it done, and now he's back to researching the Samurai era, which is much more fun than creating a travel brochure for Rwanda (DON'T GO THERE, he put on the front, after looking up DFAT's current travel advice for the country :) )

So, Thursday. Oh yes, in the evening I went to Megalo's African Famine Fundraiser night, where lots of very good art was for sale to raise funds for CARE, to be matched dollar-for-dollar by the Aust Govt. The speeches were amazing: Jon Stanhope, looking very well and fit, talking about Human Rights and the Arts; a speaker from CARE, who realised she was banging on a bit by about the 6th page of her talk and cut it down quickly, but I was actually completely engrossed in her statistics and facts... more people then the entire population of Canberra living in one refugee camp, among other shocking things. And then another young woman (I am SO BAD with names) speaking really eloquently about our capacity to engage with these events when they are ignored by mainstream media, and how to incorporate a charitable sensibility into your everyday life without giving in to periodic guilt (in other words, how to help consistently, rather than reacting to emergencies). She was amazingly good. I hope Megalo made a decent amount for the fundraiser. I bought an Alison Alder screenprint, called Drought, which seemed very fitting.

Today... I have to run around some more, but I'm hoping the weekend will be studio-based. The cats keep nagging me to go in there, because they like to watch me work (eyes like whips, the two of them). Actually, poor Pooter hasn't been 100% well this week. On Sunday night he came down with a raging fever, all limp and droopy and off his food, with red-hot paws and ears. I put him on the bed beside me, and slept lightly, checking on him, and by morning the fever had broken and he was bright-eyed and demanded FOOD, and lots of it. Phew! I was all gooey over him until yesterday, when he pooed in the bath. Charming.

class duck

I wish I had my jaunty graduation photo from my first degree to scan and put here as an illustration, but it's at Colonel Duck's place on the sideboard with all the other precious family photos. I'm wearing purple, with long bright red (henna) hair and a smug look on my face, mainly because I'd finally finished something everyone wanted me to do. [UPDATE! See here for the photo.]

At that point it was expected that I'd be a teacher, and I was set to go to do my DipEd the next year. Then I went to do a stint of work experience at what is now Bumblebee's high school (heh) and the experience was so awful that I changed my mind and cast around for some more study to do. I ended up going to ADFA as a civilian postgraduate and doing an MA, which introduced me to letterpress, which got me where I am today. Thank you, awful year 8 LHS students.

Why am I bringing this up? Firstly because last night I had to attend B's parent/teacher night. From the stories that Bumblebee tells and from the frazzled, overworked looks on some of the teachers' faces, I am profoundly grateful that I didn't become a high school teacher. There's something about the high school culture and the age of the students that screams UNWILLING. The kids don't, on the whole, want to be there, and the teachers are asked to do much more than just teach with their working time.

I do enjoy teaching, but I made a vow that I'd only teach people who wanted to be taught of their own free will. Art school students and adult workshops fit into this category. So do small children, who love being around fun things to do.

I found out in the last week or so that I'm one of five ACT artists to get a residency in a primary school for 12 weeks to undertake a collaborative project with the children and teachers. YAY! I'm having my first meeting with the school today, and we're going to start the negotiation process about the actual project. I haven't got a project in mind (although I have lots of ideas), because I want to hear what they are thinking about first, and then we'll wiggle along with ideas and plans and see where we get.

It's very exciting! That's going to eat up a chunk of my year later on, so now I'm pushing myself to finish a whole heap of stuff that's been bubbling along in an attempt to clear my desk and brain.

One thing on the boil is a PhD proposal, something I'm ambivalent about but I thought I'd give it a shot... lawdy, looking at all the paperwork and scholarship thingies and rules makes my head spin. I'm also putting together a proposal for another class in the Book Studio, a typography class, so that I can have a separate Book class and Letterpress class. I have to jump through lots of university hoops to get it going, but I have high hopes that it will happen, since the Book class is always full to the brim with people on waiting lists.

Other things that are more fun are prints for various shows & projects, and some flip books for the next Megalo members' show. Add to that the National Folk Festival at Easter (I just typed Eater... maybe that's what more secular holiday punters can call it) and I have a full dance card for a while.

Did I say last year that 2011 might be a quiet year? Yeah, right...

Oh well, there's always time to sleep when I'm dead, as it's been said.

As promised, the bed

I feel like International Wimmins Day has rolled right over me, and left me a bit bruised and exhausted. Today I've (in no particular order) packed and unpacked umpteen boxes, taught a class, bought some shoes, helped a load of students and a senior teacher, ridden my bike across town and back, had lunch with my hubbie, talked my son through his homework plans, amused the cats, attended a committee meeting and written the first draft of a second-round project application.

How's that for a full bloody life, eh? Classic over-'extender', dunno about 'achiever'.

For the record, 'buying shoes' was probably the girliest thing there besides lunching the hubbie (he paid, dammit), but the shoes themselves were NOT girlie, and anyone who knew me in the 80s (I think that's only you, Jo, and maybe Steeve, and possibly Lisa, if you read this) will laugh when they see them:



RIPPLE SOLES! I lived in these for at least ten years, then they disappeared off the shelves until this year. The guy in the shop laughed when I told him this, and said he's been trying to source them for years too. The originals ('Rollers', we both said at the same time, thus establishing our cred with each other, which I pretty much destroyed by saying 'SNAP') used to be made in Poland, but these are made in China and don't quite have the 'roll' as you walk that the Polish ones did. But I love them, and my feet are happy.

So. The bed. A gas-lift bed, for those enquiring minds who enquired, is a storage bed wot with you can store your winter/summer doonas or sex toys or whatever you want to store, and it has a gas-lift hydraulic thingy to help you lift the mattress to get to the storage (thank goodness, because we bought a huge mattress. The cats love it).



The bits, fresh from the flat-packed boxes.


The bits to put the bits together.



Me, putting the bits together. This is the abbreviated, censored, soaped-mouth version.


The gas-lift hydraulics, ready for the mattress.


The final bed, with brand-new linen. We keep looking at the old (Queen, so still big) bed on the low ex-futon base and wondering how we fitted into it. In this bed, sometimes in the night I don't even know there's someone else sleeping with me. BLISS.

Speaking of which, I desperately need a hot bath to relax my screaming muscles before I sleep. So ciao, until the next batch of bad iPhone photos or I get the chance to vent. Still no broadband, no tv, no telephone. Just a dongle. Happy IWD, peoples.

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...

Cranky & Humbuggish

Sorry for the silence
All I wish for Christmas is three extra hours in the day.
Until someone grants that wish, I'll just have to keep talking to you in my head.