In Print in IMPRINT

I am lucky that the Brisbane City Council library subscribes to Imprint, the quarterly journal of the Print Council of Australia. It saves me some money, but it does mean that I am often a month or so behind in getting my hands on the latest issue.

Over the week-end I picked up the summer 09 edition and was interested when I stumbled across an article by Doug Spowart on the SCU Acquisitive Artists' Book Award. You may remember my surprise and delight when I discovered that Like Weather had been acquired for the SCU collection. So, despite the mis-spelling of my name (dig!dig!) I was absolutely thrilled to see that a good-sized photo of my book appeared with the write-up. It was completely unexpected and the first time I can remember unexpectedly stumbling across my own work.

I found the discussion of the award and the acquisitions made most enlightening too. This is an area in which I am a complete novice, so the mention of the impact of the budget, the dreaded bottom-line, created somewhat of an "ah-ha" moment for me. In a pool of "name" book artists, I can now understand how my humble flag book made it past the post. Spowart points out that fine press and large scale books are necessarily overlooked, in order not to blow the whole budget on a single work.

I'm not saying my book should not have been acquired - clearly it had to meet certain criteria of conceptual integrity and craftsmanship to gain selection, but obviously "the price was right" too. As an artist submitting work for future awards, this is worth understanding. It's a wonderful forum in which to attain some recognition if your work falls in this category.

In addition, I don't think this will necessarily impact negatively on the SCU collection in the long term. The direction of the collection will reflect the budget certainly, but the acquisition of works by artists early in their careers, or artists who produce works by means other than fine press, can still result in the selection of high quality artist books.

I was not able to attend the announcement of the selections, so I was very interested in the reportage of the commentary made by the judge, Tara O'Brien. In particular, O'Brien had issue with the use of stab stitch, or perhaps more accurately, what she viewed as "over-use" of the binding. Practical difficulties in opening the book fully combine with the historical connection to Oriental book forms, leading O'Brien to conclude that the stab binding is often employed in Western bookmaking when another binding would be a better choice.

This comment has set me thinking ever since I read it. Yes, you guessed it - I've been planning to bind my next book using a stab stitch. I've thought about the "opening fully" issue quite a bit. The comment took me by surprise really, because I have been taught that only the coptic actually opens fully, but maybe I've got that wrong. [Certainly, a perfect binding with a soft cover does not open fully either (e.g. a paperback) not that this stops an awful lot of people from doing precisely that, but don't get me started on that!]

Being able to open a spread fully is often extremely important to a book. Certainly any sort of journal or workbook needs to open fully; also very often a book with a lot of imagery, and I think very small books and larger books can be difficult to handle and really "see", if the spread cannot be opened out flat.

While mulling this over, I came across this picture of an eighteenth century guide to Kyoto by Rito Akisato (you can pick this up for a mere US$38,500 if you feel inclined). On the right you see one of numerous open spreads depicted on the website where it is for sale. And yes, the spreads lie open beautifully. From looking at this picture, the trick seems mostly to lie in the soft thin oriental paper, which almost "drapes" over the mound of the spine. I think, also, looking at the picture of the outside of this lovely old book, that the stitching looks quite close to the spine, around only 1 cm in. From a quick look around the internet with google images, I noticed that more often the stitching is placed further in, probably around 1.5 - 2cms from the edge. This would create a much larger ridge, resulting in the book being more difficult to lie in the open position. A quick check with my Keith Smith reveals his direction that the "sewing stations are 3/8" from the spine edge"1, and 3/8" is almost exactly 1cm!

So I've decided to test this theory and go ahead and bind the first copy of my book with a stab binding. Most of the pages are vellum, and given the relationship of this book to the Japanese theme of seasons, I am hoping the binding will "work" in a practical sense. With a bit of luck, I may have this first binding ready to show you next week.

If you have thoughts about the use of stab stitch or some of the other points raised by Tara O'Brien last year, you might like to hop over to Book*Art*Object for some more discussion there.

1. Smith, Keith A. 1999. Vol1 Non-Adhesive Binding: Books Without Paste or Glue. New York: Keith Smith Books, p. 110.

Starting the year off : a little press maintenance

Well hello! Happy New Year, Australia Day and all the rest! I’ve missed you, my dear friends in the blog-o-sphere, but resisted the urge to jump back online early in order to give myself a really good break from “commitments”.

It’s been a long, hot summer and there’s still a month to go officially, but we all know that the weather pays the calendar no attention, and it will be hot here for a few months more. The humidity really saps my energy and I am forced to take a break from ceramics during the summer months, but even my “inside” studio has been pretty hot lately (it faces west, a no-no in Queensland, and has to rely on what little air-conditioning can be sucked in from the living room.) By about 3.00pm the sun starts baking me through the window and I have to wind up for the day. Even sun-loving Mia opts for the shadier end of the window sill.



Of course I haven’t taken a break from doing art for all this time (I would become pretty unbearable after a couple of weeks if I did) and I have made some progress with the Book/Art/Object project. I am getting close to having a completed artists proof, just a few more pages to finalize.

I wanted to include at least one page of embossed imagery, which I see as an effective way to communicate “trace”, absence or the remnants of what is no longer. This was the perfect motivator to do some work on my new press, preparing the roller so that the rust didn’t transfer to the blanket.

Etching Press Maintenance
I did a bit of “googling” and found quite a bit out there, including one very interesting pointer. Apparently most rollers have a sort of “thread” which assists the roller to “grab” the blanket. It’s important in cleaning the roller, not to remove the thread or you can have trouble with the blankets slipping. So this means that sandpaper is not the recommended method for removing all-over rust. Based on my reading, I came up with the following approach. It’s pretty gentle, but I thought it best not to over-do it straight up.

1. I started with a soft wire brush. It’s important not to brush horizontally. Hold the brush in place and spin the roller by hand.
2. Once most of the surface rust was removed, I splashed some white vinegar on a rag and held it in place, spinning the roller again. There is also some stuff called “Naval Jelly” used for removing rust and which you can get from the hardware. I might try that in the future.
3. A second go with the wire brush, and while the rust marks can still be seen on the roller, nothing was coming off easily.
4. I took a dampened rag (water only this time) and made sure to wipe over the roller thoroughly to remove any traces of vinegar (which is a mild acid).
5. Finally I used a clean, soft rag and gave the roller a good dry.

That was enough to be able to print without any rust coming off onto the blanket, so I left it at that. The frame and wheel still have rust, and this can be attacked with sandpaper or steel wool. Once that is done, I can’t really see why a rust-resistant paint couldn’t be used on the frame, although it’s not recommended to put anything on the roller as it will more than likely interfere with its action.

Living in such a humid climate, I expect I’ll have to do some rust removal on a fairly regular basis. You also need to oil the bearings and grease the pressure screws, maybe about once a month, but really I’m amazed at how simple it all is.

After all that was done, I was ready to test out my first plate. You can see how it turned out below.

Speaking of Seasons...

I thought I would talk a bit about my choice of imagery for the Book*Art*Object book.

I considered a few different possibilities before deciding on the mix of a jacarandah tree and photos of my mother. For a number of years I've been wanting to get more in touch with the cycle of seasons. Living in a city, I feel the need to make an effort to be more aware of nature and my place within it. I find this awareness can be both soothing and stabilising. Not being able to get out and bushwalk or something similar, I've been drawn to smaller, more urban acts, like planting seasonal flowers and enjoying seasonal produce as ways to mark the changes occurring around us. I'm interested in things that operate in cyclical ways and I also had ideas for artworks exploring the seasons as a metaphor for change for my masters, but ran out of time to explore them. Importantly, I see the seasons as a useful way to think about life and death, and to help with acceptance of this process. It seemed to me that imagery of the passing seasons could be a useful mechanism to explore the ideas inspired by the poem "Learning Absences" (Rosemary Dobson).

It struck me that when it comes to losing someone and we find ourselves needing to learn how to come to terms with their absence, we feel terribly ill-prepared. Yet, the whole of our lives could be seen as preparation in small steps for those far greater absences. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus said: "You cannot step twice into the same river" meaning change is constantly occurring, one moment to the next, and change brings loss and absence.



When I think of the seasons, I am often drawn to Spring with it's new growth and beautiful flowers, and yet in Spring, there is absence too, we just don't often take note. There is the absence of the branch, bare of foliage and flowers, seen in its starkness against a winter sky. This is the cyclical nature of the seasons that I chose to work with in this book.

I've been aware of seasonal change as a major theme in Japanese art, which I love. You see it on pottery, but also on screens and scrolls and all sort of artworks. I wanted to check out a little of how these masters worked with the seasons so I did a quick google search and found two terrific online resources. The first is the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Timeline of Art History" I think this is really exciting! You can search by work of art, time period, geographical location or theme. There are also a large number of thematic essays across a range of categories, for example there are 22 essays on Japanese art alone. And you guessed it, one of those essays is Seasonal Imagery in Japanese Art.

I also discovered that a few years ago the Art Gallery of New South Wales had an exhibition entitled Seasons: The Beauty of Transience in Japanese Art. They still have a PDF online which was part of their educational kit and it includes an essay and images from the exhibition.



With this reading behind me, I started to think how I would use seasons in my book. The classical symbol for spring in Japan is of course the cherry blossom. I am in love with cherry blossom, both the real thing and any sort of depiction of it. In fact, I happen to know I am getting this book for Christmas, but still, I wasn't sure about just adopting it holus bolus. It doesn't really say anything about me, or my life here in Queensland, Australia. I felt I needed to find a more representative plant, perhaps something Australian. But Australian native flora don't tend to be deciduous, and I wanted to use something that would show change in each season.

Fortunately, nature stepped in and offered up the obvious answer. By this time it was early October and Brisbane was starting to turn mauve, as it does every year at this time. The jacarandah tree, while not native to Australia, has certainly flourished, especially in subtropical Brisbane and Sydney. Like just about everyone who has grown up in Brisbane, I love the jacarandah, and try to make it to New Farm Park or the University of Queensland while they are in full bloom.

In the Met essay, the author notes: "A distinctive Japanese convention is to depict a single environment transitioning from spring to summer to autumn to winter in one painting ... In this way, Japanese painters expressed not only their fondness for this natural cycle but also captured an awareness of the inevitability of change, a fundamental Buddhist concept." (http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/seim/hd_seim.htm) This was pretty much how I was thinking about my book, although the transition occurs over the course of the whole book, rather than in a single image.

I'm really pleased to have started some work with seasons, and I plan to continue on this theme when this book is done. I'm looking forward to reading more about the way it's been used in Japanese art, and coming up with my own works in response.


I've decided to make this my last post for the year, and to have a few weeks break from blogging to mark the Christmas holidays. I haven't been too well this past month and I really feel the need for a break. When you don't go out to a job, it can be difficult to work out what constitutes a break unless you are actually able to go away. Funnily enough, blogging is one of my few commitments in the outside world, and I can actually manage to make myself stressed and guilty when I don't post regularly!

So I'll finish by thanking everybody who has followed my blog this year. Thanks to the new people who have joined recently, and thanks especially to those "old hands" who've been cyber-friends for a while now. Your interest, friendship and support means the world to me.

I plan to take a break till the schools go back after Australia Day, but to make sure you don't all wander off into the blogosphere and never find your way back, I thought I'd let you know some of the things I'm hoping to do in 2010: crank up the new etching press, experiment with my gocco printer, make a return to ceramics with another porcelain book, all of which I'll be documenting here.

I wish you all a beautiful Christmas, a relaxing break and and an inspired and creative new year. xoxox

Using Transparency and Translucency in Books

Above: A look at some of the translucent pages layered together.

In my last post, I mentioned that I am using vellum for many of the pages in this book. I thought I would explain my thinking and the intent behind this choice.

Working in ceramics, I could make any shape or form (within the limits of my skills, of course!) that made sense for the idea I wanted to communicate. So in choosing to limit myself to the book form, the particular structure and materials employed are inherent to the meaning of the work. At this stage, I'm not planning for the book I'm making for the Book*Art*Object project to have any ceramic parts. Incorporating porcelain or other clay has to make absolute sense, and not be about working with clay because that's "what I do".

It doesn't take long working in the book arts to come across the scholarly contributions of Keith Smith to the field. In addition to five volumes of practical binding techniques, he has also published a number of titles exploring more theoretical concerns of using the book as a vessel of expression. Eventually I hope to own the entire collection, but late last year I picked up a second hand copy of "Structure of the Visual Book" (1994).

I have to confess that I am nowhere near finished reading this book in its entirety. It isn't that it is heavy going or difficult to understand. It's just that there is so much to consider and experiment with, that I haven't got far. It is certainly a book that you can dive into, to read what Smith has to say about say, blank pages, and although my plan is to read the book from front to back eventually, I can see there will be sections of particular relevance to the way I work, that I will return to again and again. If you never had a look at this book, I really recommend it.

Early in the introduction, Smith talks about using transparent materials as pages. For me, after working with porcelain, the concept of transparency bounces back and forth, in my head anyway, with translucency. Most ceramics are static objects, so working with books, the whole idea of "turning pages" and the power and meaning in this fundamental action is still very exciting to me. The act of page-turning represents the passing of time in the work, and if the page is made from a transparent or translucent material, then it seems to me to imply the way the past and the future can impinge on the present, if we let them.

In his book, Smith talks about using a number of transparent pages in sequence to enable imagery to be built-up and torn-down again by the turn of the page. He also discusses the way a shadow will be cast by the page as it is turned, moving into and out of focus. Both of these seem to me to work well as metaphors for emotional turmoil, for the way we grieve and do the emotional-work that is required of us in order to deal with loss. I'm incorporating a mix of pages in my book, transparent, translucent and opaque and I'm hoping they will work together to suggest the stop-start confusion and growth that occurs at these times.

Above: Translucent pages layered together.

Detail shots

With the heat we've been experiencing here this past week, I haven't been too well, so progress on my book has been slow. I have started printing the first digital pages, but that involves a lot of colour checking and testing, and I haven't really progressed since last Monday.

However, I am finding how beneficial Photoshop is for this type of project. Combining the layers function and with adjustments to the opacities allows me to move imagery backwards and forwards, and experiment with potential page orders. This satisfies some of my urge to keep up the momentum, but of course I'd rather be working with the actual pages.

Below are some detail shots of different orderings of pages. These are just tests - it may be that none of these are in the final book, in just this way. In case you haven't guessed, quite a number of the pages will be vellum, and therefore transparent. In my next post I'll write a bit about why I made this choice.

Book Art Object

While I've taken a break from blogging lately, I've still been making art. It's been a great source of both consolation and distraction, and I feel lucky to have it as part of my life.

Back in August I joined Book Art Object, a group of book artists established by Sara of Double Elephant fame. The idea of the group is for each member to make a work in response to a set poem or novel. There are a few guidelines to draw the works together, such as size of finished work and inclusion of a colophon acknowledging the inspiration and the group, but other than that, we have left our options open, at least for this first project. One of the most appealing aspects of group membership, apart from being part of this special little online community, is the fact that at the end, every member receives a "full set" of the books made. If you would like to follow our progress or read more, head over to the blog here.

The set piece for our first project is a very evocative poem, by Rosemary Dobson. Here it is:

Learning Absences (1986)

Being alone is also to be learnt
Long time or short time.

Walking the length of the house, shutting
The doors and the windows

No longer calling casually over one's shoulder.
Returning to find no trace

Of the other, companionable living -
Bread smell, the stove still warm,

Clothes on the line like messages,
Or messages written and left on the kitchen table:

"We need to keep watering the cumquat."
Or, "I have paid the milkman."

At night, at this season, lingering at the window
Not being certain where to find Halley's Comet,

And looking a long time at the darkening sky.

Text taken from "Rosemary Dobson, Collected Poems", part of the Angus & Robertson series 'Modern Poets'. Published 1991, ISBN 0 207 16864 4. Text copyright © Rosemary Dobson 1991.

It is important to me that any works I make extend the concepts that I have been exploring over the past few years. Since starting my masters, I've been examining transience and change in life, and this has at times inevitably led to works about death. I view death as an inevitable part of life, and something to be worked with and understood, before we finally must face it ourselves. There is in fact so much (in fact, almost everything) in life, that could prepare us for death and make it less frightening, but many people choose to avoid looking at this truth, which surrounds us.

Only 3 weeks after the poem was chosen for the group by Sara, my mother died. At first I wondered whether I'd be able to continue in the group. It wasn't apprehension about the subject matter that raised this for me. I was more concerned about my health and energy at this time, which I view as one of the most important and significant psychological and spiritual moments in a person's life. I want (and need) to be able to engage with the learning and adaptive processes that can be catalyzed by an event like this. I knew I was entering a challenging and tiring period.


Eventually I realized that the poem chosen by Sara and the opportunity to make work in response, were a gift and as long as I remain open, the project could be very healing and therapeutic for me. So I plunged in and began thinking about how to approach the poem.

Inspired by some ideas I've had rattling around for ages, I've taken the subject matter of the poem as a starting point, rather than working more illustratively. I'm aiming to draw parallels between the cycles of the seasons and the human life cycle. Dobson focuses on the experience of absence, probably the most painful aspect of loss or death. In mt book, I'm working with the idea that because change is constant, there is always absence of what was before, and this process can help us learn to deal with those "big" absences.

This is quite a long wordy post - I haven't chatted with you for ages so I've got lots to talk to you about! But before I go I thought I'd share a little of the imagery for the book. I started by developing a digital image for each season. Bear in mind that these then have to be worked into pages, and will change somewhat. Below are spring and winter.








Next time I'll tell you how the book will be printed and how I developed this imagery.

And the mystery item is....

.... an etching press. Carol and Sara did very well with their guesses - you know me well!

At the moment it has a bit of superficial rust from living out in a shed, but it was reconditioned a few years ago and is very solid. All the moving parts operate smoothly and easily, so it's really just in need of a cosmetic clean-up, some oil and grease for lubrication and some new felts and it will be ready to go! So far I've spent just over $400 including transport and I can't believe my luck! I've had an eye out for more than a year and this is the only one that I've seen on offer that wasn't $2000+

By the way, if anyone out there has any advice about caring for this little beauty, I'm all ears.