Work in progress - Cats!

 

 

Some hand-printed proofs of the beginnings of a body of work, A Taxonomy of Cats.

A lover of cats, I've noticed that there are a lot of images of cats in art. Here, the cats are taken out of their context and classified in a faux 'scientific' taxonomy - walking cats, curled, sleeping, sitting up tall or cleaning themselves.  Hunting cats are probably next.  I'm thinking of presenting them as a large educational/scientific poster.  This is one part of an exhibition I'm planning for next year...The Obsessions of  Woman of a Certain Age(!)  The other obsession is Leonard Cohen.  Going for a bit of alliteration...Cohen and Cats!!

 

 

An Inventory of Al-Mutanabbi Street - artist book project

A week or so ago I finally finished and posted off my contribution to the project - An Inventory of Al-Mutanabbi Street - a response to the bombing of Al-Mutanabbi Street - the street of the booksellers in Baghdad - on 5 March 2007. More information about the project can be seen here.

Bagdad reads * Fragments is a collection of linocut printed and typewritten text fragments taken from the history of Baghdad as a centre of learning, from Iraqi poetry and descriptions of the project, An Inventory of Al-Mutanabbi Street.  The words are printed on very light, somewhat transparent paper, suggesting the fragility of the situation for the booksellers of Al-Mutanabbi Street.  The red of the rather messy pastepaper cover also makes reference to the destruction of the bombings.
The first work on which I've used my recently-purchased typewriter...so excited to have a typewriter!

Something I've been making...

It's been much longer than I'd planned since my last post, so I thought I put up a couple of images of something I've been making, as all the other projects I'm working on are still a week or so from having images to show.  So here are some cards I've made recently . Linocut prints on pages of my copy of Jane Eyre (which fell apart when I re-read it earlier this year) and musical score (bought from an Op shop).

and gelatin prints

 

The Vivienne Binns exhibition finished a week or so ago and I was very happy to have it reviewed by Robert Nelson in The Age/Sydney Morning Herald. You can read it here.

 

Vivienne Binns: Art and Life at LUMA

So the exhibition is up and running on its own now.  The opening went well - even though I had public speaking thrust upon me...and that was okay in the end.  I've given a couple of curator's talks and the catalogue is well received.  Now time to relax a little, or focus upon other things.  I'm really happy with it.
Here are a couple of photos from the opening, both taken by my friend, Brian Pieper.

Vivienne Binns speaking about her work, LUMA, July 2012



Vincent Alessi, Creative Director, LUMA and Vivienne Binns, exhibition opening Vivienne Binns: Art and Life.


In terms of my own art, I'm currently working on three projects - my book for the Inventory of Al-Mutanabbi Street, my edition for Book Art Object, working with the title A girl waiting and a project about cats from Art History - working title A Taxonomy of (Art) Cats.  Very soon I plan (Promise?) to post some images of proofs of something here!!

Pay it Forward

This is really a quite belated post.  Back in April I responded to this post by Jac.

I couldn't have put it better.  She said,' One of the things I like about the web is the ability to make connections with people across the globe, the idea of being able to share ideas and techniques and to have a ‘conversation’ with like minded people whom I probably wouldn’t get the opportunity to meet in person'.

Like Jac, I like the idea of sharing not only tecniques, experiments, thoughts and images but also, on a small scale, pieces of ‘real’ work. Which is why I responded to the post.

A couple of days ago I received a very beautiful book called Weave, in the mail from Jac in England. There are images of the book on  her blog, but here is just one...

So now it's my turn to pay it forward.

If you want to join in, this is how it works.

If you leave a comment here I will send the first three people a small handmade gift via snail mail (and post links to those three bloggers). They will then put a post up about Pay It Forward (with a link back to my blog) and will also send on to three more people small  handmade gifts via snail mail etc.etc

Vivienne Binns - Art and Life

It's been a VERY long time since I posted here...mainly because I've been focussing upon deadlines - in particular, an exhibition of Vivienne Binns' work I've curated at the LaTrobe University Museum of Art.

It's about the way in which aspects of Binns' personal life - her family, friends, relationships and exploration of self - have frequently been  the subject of her art, or influenced the direction of her research.   

 It's coming together and looking fabulous- opening next Tuesday night. I will be giving a curator's talk on Wedneday 11th July.

Fourfold at The Light Factory Gallery, Eltham

I've been to see an excellent print exhibition a week or so ago - Fourfold at The Light Factory Gallery in Eltham. A green-belt suburb on the outer-north of Mebourne, Eltham has a reputation and history as a hub of artisitic activity. While Montsalvat, the artist-community established by Justus Jorgensen in the 1930s, remains a thriving focus for the area, today there are  few other galleries in Eltham.  The Light Factory Gallery, though only a couple of years old, is embedded in Eltham's history as the building was designed by Alistair Knox.  It's quite a beautiful building and makes a wonderful gallery with banks of windows up at roof-level that fill the space with light.
The current exhibition is called Fourfold, an exhibition of four printmakers. Kate Hudson, Clare Humphries, Violeta Capovska and Georgia Thorpe all work in relief printmaking, but with a great diversity in style and aesthetic.  Hudson's black and white linocut prints of floral still-lifes recall the work of Margaret Preston with their crisp lines, patterning and  stylisation of forms.  Preston hand coloured her flowers after printing in black, while Hudson offers both simple black and white and multi-coloured examples using the reduction technique.   In other works pairs of birds set within a network of foliage are similarly decorative - and I don't consider that a perjorative term at all!  See some of her works from the exhibition here.
Clare Humphries' linocut prints offer simple objects which emerge from a dark ground.  Central to her current practice is the idea  that objects, often quite simple objects, that belonged to deceasd loved ones may hold some essence or tactile memory of their owners.  Her process is time consuming and exacting, involving creating a reduction linoprint of an object such as a handkerchief or a thimble, overprinting it with layers of black ink and then hand burnishing so that the object re-emerges from the darkness.  Content and process are inextricably linked; the objects lost beneath the surface of the ink, but recovered (as a memory?) through the laborious process of burnishing.
Examples of the works in this exhibition can be seen here.
Violeta Capovska's large-scale images of flowers, tightly framed, reminiscent of some of Georgia O'Keefe's paintings are printed in severeal shades of violet, suggesting highly enlarged magazine photographs. I read that her work explores cultural approaches towards the female body and this would also suggest a connection to the work of Georgia O'Keefe. Some of Capovska's work can be seen here. 

Georgia Thorpe

 I was perhaps most attracted to Georgia Thorpe's work - large prints, richly coloured, layered,  textured, and artist's books printed on soft mulberry paper.   The main compositional elements of the  prints are woodcuts, with layers of intaglio texture, and hand colouring added. As this method of working might suggest, Thorpe does not generally produce editions of prints, but rather series of ‘unique states.’  She also showed a groups of fascinating altered books - quite old stab-bound Japanese script books, a couple of which contained the libretto (perhaps not quite the correct term) for Noh play - an ancient Japanese masked theatre combining drama, music and dance.  The books are quite beautiful and fascinating objects in themselves.  Thorpe has inserted her prints of knots and dipped the books in dark dyes, adding to their mystery.Some of her work can be seen here.