Books...Beyond Words: Shortlisted for Award

I was over the moon to find that I have been shortlisted for this artists books award, to be held at East Gippsland Art Gallery from August 8 to September 1, 2009.

The gallery is in Bairnsdale in regional Victoria and they are planning to make this award and exhibition a biennial event. It is wonderful to see how artists books are growing in popularity and stature.

The work of mine that was shortlisted is Self (States of Change) a book with porcelain pages. I've written about this book before on this blog, as it was part of my masters body of work.

Here are a few pictures of the book and I've also included an edited excerpt about the book from my masters, for those who are in "that way" inclined. I apologize in advance for the academic jargon and "art talk".




"Two works, an installation and a book, were developed from the experiments
with self portraits.


A black square was painted on to a board and wet clay was pressed onto the
black area. A life size self portrait (head only) was made by transferring an
inkjet print onto the clay, which was then cut to shape by following the outline.
The clay was allowed to dry and once it had fallen to the ground, the pieces were re-assembled sufficiently to allow them to be read as a portrait. A clay trace remained on the board.



A series of photographs were taken documenting the process of the clay
drying. These were digitally processed using Photoshop and sent away to be
made into decals to be used in a porcelain book. .....


An artists’ book, entitled Self (States of Change) was the work made using the porcelain pages. The goal of the book was to explore the tension created by the juxtaposition of process and permanence. These are represented by the changing portrait (unfired clay slowly drying and cracking) versus the documentation of the moment, a snapshot of “what was”.



The work presents “what has ceased to be”, as described by Barthes (1981)
and explores the relentless progression of time and change, in contrast with
the human desire to hold onto the past. The images are presented in sepia, a
photographic tradition employed to add a sense of nostalgia (Photography.com, 2008). The presentation of the photographs on pages made from porcelain further emphasizes the desire to retain that which has gone, by its association with the enduring materiality of the high fired ceramic.



In order to activate the viewing process, it was decided that the pages would
remain unbound. They are presented in a purpose-built clamshell box, and the
viewer is able to handle each page and to determine how the sequence is
ordered. The clay slabs were hand-rolled and there is evidence of the expected
variation of the handmade, which serves to humanize the work. There are
cracks in the clay and the translucency of the porcelain allows the viewers’
fingers to be visible through the pages, drawing them into the image....."

Overcoming Inertia

If any of you are also on Facebook you may have seen that I set myself a challenge last Tuesday - that I would post on this blog within 48 hours. Well, so much for that! But I wrote that to help myself overcome what I call "inertia".

It's something I never experienced before I had CFS, but just at the moment I'm having it a lot. It's not the same as lacking motivation or procrastinating, although from the "outside" it could look much the same. And it's not the same as being too tired.

It occurs on the way up from being really tired, and also on the way down. You have enough energy to have ideas, and even to know exactly how you want to start, but that's as far as it goes. It's an uncomfortable mental space, because you really want to get going with whatever the idea is, but you just can't.

To be honest, there is no sure fire way of overcoming inertia, because it really is about not having the energy to get organised and kick off. I think the best thing to do is to make sure everything you need is ready, and also to try to have lots of free time. This works both to let you rest, so you can build up energy, and also means that when your energy finally does reach the required level, you are free and available and able to capitalize, not having scheduled "low energy time fillers" in your frustration and boredom.

I've been seeing it as rather like those days at the beach, when the swell is small and you must wait patiently for a decent wave to arrive so you can jump up on your board and enjoy the ride.

Exploring text as image

Life's been full and as ever, challenging since my last post. I attended an orientation to the facilities at Impress Printmaker's Studio and am now eligible to book time there to use the equipment. It's the same studio I mentioned in previous posts, and they have a UV box for exposing solarplates and a number of presses. I'm quite excited about the possibilities this opens up for me, and the convenience of the studio, being only 10 minutes away from my home is wonderful. I've heard on the grapevine that they are thinking of re-locating to larger premises, which would be good for them but I hope it doesn't happen too soon.

In preparation for my first session at Impress, I am working on images to expose for a book. I've been using Photoshop to experiment with ordering and layout - ah, what a wonderful tool PS can be! Here's a peek at two possible pages - it's just a rough "sketch" .




As well as pages based on imagery, I've been exploring some text-based pages. I love constructivist, dada and futurist art with their use of typography as a graphic element, and of course artists in these movements were the first in the 20th century to produce artists books. This is one of my favourite examples of this type of work.

Ruth Laxson is a book artist who is a great source of inspiration to me. She began her press, Press 63 Plus, at age 63 and established herself as much respected in the field. Her books expressed a real playfulness with text and are reminiscent of concrete poetry.

Playing around with text in Photoshop (which, by the way, makes exploring that kind of artwork so much easier) I have decided that I really want to develop my own style with text. The beauty of the constructivists is that their artwork looks deceptively simple, but that is the way of all good design. Of course, it never is that simple to achieve the dynamism and perfect composition required. Like Ruth Laxson, I hope to make the visual impression of the text echo the sense of the words. I came up with a number of alternatives - the one below is the one I find most satisfying.

Testing the limitations of the pasta machine as etching press

Despite spending most of this week trying to recover from the stress of the past few weeks, I did manage one afternoon in the studio.

Following on from last week's post about solarplate etching, I decided to run the test plates from the workshop through my pasta machine press. To anyone who has missed earlier posts where I've mentioned this little beauty, it is exactly what it says - a pasta making machine which I use for intaglio printmaking. I learned about this in an online printmaking course I took a couple of years ago.

To pass the test plates, which are only small strips approx 10cm x 3cm through the press, I decided to place the plate on some perspex. The dampened paper goes does next and then I experimented with the "felts". For the pasta press I use half sheets of the felt that you buy from craft shops. Depending on type of plate you are using and therefore how thick it is, I have used up to 3 layers of felt to give the desired pressure. In this case, with the perspex backing sheet, 1 layer of felt was all that would fit through between the rollers. And the results are below:



I have to confess that the umber speckles on the person are old sepia ink from the workshop that I hadn't cleaned off properly. They make the clouds look more like land masses I think, and could be useful in certain circumstances. I am pretty happy with how these tests turned out, and plan to continue developing this imagery. I think the pasta press has shown that it is definitely up to doing test runs, and if the imagery is not as finely detailed as the clouds on the left, it can even be used for the final print, especially where embossing is a feature.



Next I thought I would try my zinc etching plate through the pasta press, just to see how that worked. Almost straight away I discovered a problem:

Photo: kschmic, photobucket

Unless your plate is shorter than the distance from the rollers to the base plate, it needs to be flexible, so you can pull it forward as you wind the plate through. Previously I've used perspex, mylar and mat board for the plate, so flexibility has never been an issue, but with the zinc plate being 20cm long and obviously inflexible, it couldn't pass through the press. Oh well! maybe I'm the only person crazy enough to think of putting a zinc plate through a pasta machine anyway!

I do have a couple of prints of the etching I did on zinc to show you. It's not completely finished but the term of classes I was doing at Studio West End has come to an end, so this is as far as I can take the etching for now. I apologize for the quality of the images, but the prints are a bit large for my scanner so I have photographed them, and it's getting a bit dark.

This first attempt (below) is just the line etch with plate tone in sepia. I quite liked it, but I thought more atmosphere could be created by working with the light.

For this version (below), we added a number of aquatints, progressively darkening the plate. I think we've maybe gone a bit far, but it is possible to burnish back some areas to lighten them. I was about to try this when I discovered the pasta press couldn't be used to print the result.

Soon I will have access to an etching press through the community printmaking studio Impress Printmakers, so I'll be able to keep working on this plate then.









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Solar-powered techniques Part 2: Solarplate printmaking

Thank-you to everyone who has written to me with best wishes for my mother. After 8 days in hospital she is glad to be home. I was able to clear out most other commitments and made it as easy for myself as I could, so that I could be there for her as much as possible. I am pretty tired out now and am trying to take it easy in order to recover. I hope that you will understand if I don't respond to your kind messages personally.


In April I finally made it to a second workshop at Impress Printmakers Studio. My first one was in 2006 and was my introduction to artists books. This recent workshop was on Solarplate Printmaking.

Solar plates are a method of exposing plates either for relief or intaglio printmaking. It's another low toxicity technique that looks pretty simple and that I have been aching to try for about 3 years. Luckily, I purchased the "bible" on the technique around that time, as it is out of print and as time passes, the price is rising in a rather unbelievable fashion. Dan Welden took solar plates from their commercial application and experimented with their use in fine art settings. He wrote the book with an Australian scientist and artist, Pauling Muir and gave it the rather lyrical title "Printmaking in the Sun". I believe that a second edition is currently being written.

The book is amazing. It is wonderfully thorough but if anything, the talk of exposure times and test strips made me feel that I really needed to attend a workshop before I could give this technique a try. Once we went through it at the workshop, I realized that the basic technique is simple, although each print you make will be different and a certain amount of testing and "tweaking" is necessary to get the result you want.

The basic process is:

• prepare your artwork on e.g. wet media acetate, OHT, drafting film (intaglio images are not reversed while relief ones are)
• place your art and the plate in a contact frame and expose to UV light (the sun or a lamp/light box will harden the polymer in the areas it reaches)
  
• remove and rinse in water, using a soft brush to remove areas that have not hardened (i.e parts of the image where the UV could not pass through to the plate)
• print!

Personally, my greatest interest is in finding a way to make intaglio prints. I don't really like the idea of working with the acid and other materials necessary for traditional etchings. It seems very daunting. Recently Wim de Vos at Studio West End took me through the hard ground process, together with aquatinting and that has dispelled some of the mystery around the whole thing, but I still feel it could take me years to produce anything I find truly satisfying. I like the idea of working away here at home with solar plates; plus they provide the option of using my photographs as a starting point, which is very appealing to me.

The major drawback I can see with solar plates is cost. The plates themselves are not cheap: $14 for a 15 x 21cm plate against $7.90 for 12.5 x 20cm zinc plate. And while there are no other chemicals to buy for the process, it is quite possible to ruin a plate with the wrong exposure (once you've rinsed the plate, you can't re-expose if you aren't happy with the result). I guess this is where real discipline needs to be exercised to ensure you test your exposure and print your test plates, and keep testing until you have the result you are looking for. That way you are only wasting small pieces of plate, rather than a full plate. According to Dan Welden, it is possible to re-work plates by scratching into them with etching and drypoint tools, but I can imagine this wouldn't always give the result you were seeking.

Well, I suppose you might like to see some results from the day for yourselves. I'm not too sure how impressive they will look online, but they will give you some idea. I plan to re-print them using the old "pasta machine press" to see how the plates respond.

This first test (below) is an intaglio print made with some of my cloud imagery. This was originally part of this photo.

This silhouette (below) comes from the cover of "Resistance" (which by the way I hope to return to soon, now that the weather is cooler). They were both printed in both relief and intaglio. The lovely thing about them is the debossing, which you can't really pick up in these pictures.

500 Ceramic Sculptures (including mine!)

Just a quick post to share some exciting news, as this week has been taken up with hospital visiting. My mother, who is now 84, has had a heart attack so things have been a bit crazy here.

At the same time, the Lark book "500 Ceramic Sculptures" has been published and my copy arrived earlier this week. I like the format of these books as many of the images are full page...including one of an earlier work of mine. (see below)

This work was exhibited in a solo show at Craft Queensland in 2002, and my thanks must go to the photographer Alastair Bett, who generously offered his services to document the show. There are more photos of the show on flickr, and I wrote about it in this blog post. The installation of the porcelain pieces was re-worked in Livable 2, which was shown in Melbourne in 2005 in the group show "Home Ground".

This is the first time my work has been included in a book and it is an exciting step for me. These achievements in the "real world" are all more sweet for the extra time they take, and of course my mother is thrilled about it too.

Exploring solar-powered techniques Part 1: Sunprints

I don't know whether it's a subliminal effect of "Earth Hour" or just the fact that at last it is a little cooler here and I can actually enjoy being outside again, but recently I've tried out two art techniques that rely on the sun (or UV). Both are things I've been interested in trying for a couple of years (!) but had to wait until my studies were done.

I love many of the old photographic techniques that are now experiencing a revival as "alternative techniques", especially photograms and cyanotypes. Historically, the greatest proponents of photograms are Man Ray, who re-named them rayographs(!) and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. The basic concept is that instead of using a camera and film, you place an object directly on photo-sensitive paper and expose it, then fix it and rinse as usual.

Cyanotypes, also known as blueprints, were traditionally used for plans in architecture and for recording botanical specimens. It's a simple process that can be used for photograms or with a contact negative (where the negative is placed directly on the paper, rather than using an enlarger).

I've been planning to buy a cyanotype kit from this photographic store in Melbourne, when I knew I would have some time to experiment, but last year when I was at the Tate Gallery, I saw these "Sunprint" papers in the shop. Although designed for kids, I knew some people on Flickr had used this type of thing to good effect, and besides at less than 5GBP, there was nothing to lose.

The papers sat among my supplies for nearly a year and when I stumbled across them about a week ago I was a bit dismayed to see the packet said: "use within 6 months of purchasing"....so I rushed out to give them a try.

One idea that relates to process and change that I didn't have a chance to explore in my masters was "the life cycle". I've had a number of ideas about this that I hope to eventually explore, and one symbol I'm drawn to is the chrysalis. So rather than using objects for my sunprint test, I decided to use a drawing of a chrysalis that I was preparing on transparency for a workshop (more about this soon).



I think the paper manages to pick up a surprising degree of subtlety from the image, considering it was drawn with a chinagraph pencil. The beauty of this paper is that it comes ready to use and is processed in ordinary water, so it's low toxic. There's only a bit of testing with regards exposure time, if you want to be really picky. If you'd like to see some more examples take a look at Sunprint and Photograms groups on Flickr.