silence and the love of printmaking .....

Sometimes when reading an artists' book there comes the delight of knowing that the experience is far greater than the sum of its parts.  I hope that makes sense - it does to me but then I have just had the experience.

What I mean is that this book essentially exists of five etchings done by me with gorgeous quotes which Fiona and I chose on 'silence', added to the etchings with Fiona's calligraphy.  I remember saying to Fiona when we started making this book, that I didn't want it to feel like 'bits of calligraphy'.  Works of calligraphy can be very beautiful in their own right, but I wanted this last of our collaborative books to look and feel 'booklike'.

Until this work was finally made I did not love it.  Partly this was due  to the fact that this was a more typical collaboration where I was responsible for the artwork (and how does one represent 'silence'!) and Fiona the calligraphy.  Previously we have explored 'collaboration' in a much more involved and intimate way and this last book left us feeling a little disconnected until finally bringing it together in this very soft and gentle, quiet book.

Each page is wrapped in tengujo paper and the act of revealing each work is slow and meditative.  The light plays a large part in the reading of this book and because of the manner of its presentation you cannot rush the reading.  Now that it is made and I can experience it as a whole, it reminds me why I love making artists' books and will keep making them.  The slow reveal, the feel of the gorgeous soft papers ..... definitely more than the sum of its parts.

 In these images you can see how the interleaving pages and the light play such an integral part of this book and to its feeling of 'silence'.

And here you can see some of the pages and details.  I used only sugar lift with this work as I wanted to keep everything very soft and fluid.  Lines are partially inked, delicately wiped. I had hoped that there would be enough definition in the uninked lines to be embossed but they were too faint so I had to make embossing plates for the etchings once they had dried.  The embossing added the lift that the marks needed.  It is hard to show that photographically.

I think it is hard to find anything more beautiful in combination that the softness of an etched mark and the crispness of an embossed line.   It is a perfect partnership.

With infinite possibilities, Fiona had to decide  how to write these beautiful quotes.  Couldn't have been more perfect really.

As a complete departure from the unique nature of all our other collaborative books, Fiona and I decided to edition these books, an edition of 10 and a further edition of 10 of each of the prints separately.  These will be for sale at the Noosa Regional Gallery or beforehand.

step by step .....

Once again it has been an age since I posted on my blog but plenty has been happening behind the scenes.  The next couple of photographs are really just a tease ... I am sure Fiona and I will post on this book 'silence' soon.  It is the last of our collaborative books and was done in a more traditional collaboration where I created the artwork and Fiona was responsible for the beautiful quotes we sourced on 'silence'.  It is a very quiet and meditative book and we will speak more of it later as we have editioned this book and have also made a second edition of the five individual prints.

'silence' by Susan Bowers and Fiona Dempster.

I have had to keep away from more toxic things in the last months and as such have been revisiting my painting and drawing days and having a great deal of fun in the process.  Earlier this year I did a workshop with Noela Mills on textures and using some of the elements I learnt I have been working on 'textures of australia' which will form one of the bodies of my work for the up coming exhibition at Noosa Regional Gallery.  I have made four larger individual works and a piece made up of sixteen smaller works to be hung as a four by four installation.  I am really looking forward to seeing them up on walls and not just scattered over my studio floor.

The inspiration for these works has been our trips to the outback of Australia and being lucky enough to take helicopter flights or small plane flights over lake Eyre and Lake Armadeus - both of which were oceans of salt whipped up by wind.  Though the two years prior to my flight over Lake Eyre had been popular viewing because of all the flood water which came down from the north of Australia, I was lucky enough to be there when the typical dry was back and witness the aftermath of a windstorm the night before which created gorgeous patterns and marks and almost made the desert landscape look like frozen tundra, or our ocean shores.

It fascinates me that what we see from on high by way of patterns and marks over extensive landscape, can be repeated in a single rock or stone found on the ground.  People associate the vivid blues and reds with our outback but my eye is always drawn to these soft greys and ochres, charcoals and mauves. In this painting below you can see the remnant of water left in some small puddles amidst what looks like ice but is salt residue.

I have finally completed my 3D drawings ... seventeen of them which will spread across a wall a couple of metres - hopefully in a spot with much delicious light which seems to bring these drawings to life.  The wall upon which I hang them for viewing in my studio has barely any light so they don't look their best.  The process for each of these is quite involved as I firstly need to make the drawings, each of which is between 90cms and 130cms  in height and in various widths.  Once this is done I actually score the paper, which is mostly architectural film inherited from my father, hoping like anything that I am not cutting right through the film and ruining the drawings.  Strangely enough, once all the drawing and the scoring and folding has taken place, one of the most difficult things is to actually the stick down the works along their backs so they become totemic.  Not all all easy when you are not able to get your hands or arms into the lengths of the sculptured drawings!

Part of me thinks that is would be so much easier just to make a number of two dimensional drawings and forget about working in 3D - though I think this is as close to sculpture I will ever come. I am planning some very large two dimensional works in this vein though they won't be happening till later this year, or next year!

I am using many different layers with the drawings - mostly using inks, graphite power and pencils.  I have tried to keep the drawings varied and yet hope they all hang well together.  Mostly they deal with trees and their markings and textures.

I quite like the softness of the backs ...

The seventeen - though I haven't actually decided if this is the final number!

And some details here, and below.

I am also working on a number of artist's books at the moment.  The glimpses of this one below are from a book which will be called 'standing on fishes' and taken from the work of  Rainer Marie Rilke. If you don't know the poem I would 'google' it as it is sublime.  I have had the quote on my computer desktop for a couple of years now and always wanted to make a book of images to suit.  The imagery just happened and when I had made the fourth image and to me it looked exactly like fish beneath the water, I knew I had found my book.  Now I just have to find a way to write the words on the pages ......  will need to solicit the aid of Fiona I am sure though ultimately I want to actually write in the book myself.  I am still in the process of working out how to present this book, what papers to use, whether I need to add anymore drawing or artwork, whether to emboss covers and so forth.  Need to get a wiggle on though as the date for submitting our list of works get closer and closer.

preserve .... a burnt book

It was my idea last year to suggest to Fiona that we do a 'burn book' and in my mind's eye I thought Fiona would hand me some pages of her lovely delicate burning with which to work, and in exchange I would hand over some very delicate but randomly burnt paper and somehow, magically, a soft pretty kind of burn book would emerge.  Ha!  Things don't often  work out as you see them in your minds' eye and this book couldn't be more different from the one I envisaged.

That being said, the challenge has resulted in a book that I would have to say is probably my favourite.  The resulting book looks quite simple but it took months of head wrangling and stomach aching to reach this point.  Fiona's work is very distinctive and when I was presented with seven pages of her gorgeous calligraphy about the burning of books, and ideas that can't be destroyed but fly onwards, I knew I had some serious thinking to do.  To somehow take apart her work and make it mine, and yet because her words were profound, I needed to find my own words, my own reason for bringing this book into being.

In July last year I committed to a project called 'Absence and Presence' - a printmaking project as part of a large ongoing body of work across the globe called 'Mutanabbi Street Starts Here'.  Instigated and co-ordinated by Beau Beausoleil who is based in San Francisco, this work has been in direct response to the bombing of Al Mutanabbi Street, the cultural precinct of Baghdad in 2007. Home to intellectuals, printers, writers, book shops and coffee shops for centuries.  I have yet to make my prints (I have until July this year) but my mind is always ticking over ideas and thus the burning of books, the destruction of priceless treasures, the preservation of books and so on has been on my mind for some time. For longer still is the heartache I feel every time I read of, or hear of the wilful destruction of libraries and the burning of books.  

I am a great fan of asemic writing and rarely use explicit text in my work.  Never in fact.  this book however has two layers of written text.  Not hugely legible because it is engraved into the perspex with a dremel, but if you try hard you can read what is being said.  The black writing is done on the inside of the book and then inked so in fact the writing is then reversed.  I have listed some of the atrocities perpetrated by human intent upon libraries from pre 206BC when Qin Shi Huang had order the burning of books and burying of scholars in Xianyang, Qin China through to the latest heartbreak in Mosul were ISIS burnt 8000 rare books and manuscripts.  

The burning, and there was a great deal of it done to these pages, and then the writing down of these details about the destruction of Libraries throughout history, left me feeling quite desolate.  I had downloaded an article about the burning of books in Mosul by ISIS in the Fiscal Times by Riyadh Mohammed written on February 23 about half way through the article was this lovely passage ...

'900 years ago, the books of the Arab philosopher Averroes were collected before his eyes ..... and burned.  One of his students started crying while witnessing the burning. Averroes told him ..... the ideas have wings .... but I cry today over our situation.'

I thought about using those words ' ideas have wings' in this book, but instead, wrote on the outside of the book, or I should say engraved with an etching needle, the words from one of my very favourite poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins - God's Grandeur.  You can read these words quite clearly if you go hunting across the pages - they don't leap out but they are there.  I have included a copy of this poem at the end of this post.

In my previous post I did mention that there had been enormous difficulties in the making of this book and many of those were due to the structure/construction of the perspex.  I was going to write of these difficulties but really, they are not important.  I am pleased with the result of this book and though it certainly is not the first perspex book I have made, I have included new ideas and techniques in this one which I will use again.  This collaboration of Fiona's and mine certainly does push us but each time we complete a book, we find we have learnt something new about techniques and mostly about ourselves and the way we see and thus make.

I do need to add for those of you who may be looking around for the burnt paper which was to be my contribution, and with which you have seen me play in the last couple of posts.  I decided not to use any of it.  The paper added nothing to the concept of this book and felt superfluous so I felt quite happy to just put it aside.

a pity to have to photograph the book with a white paper background as you lose the effect of the burnt fragments being suspended in the perspex - much like specimens on a slide

this photo gives you a better idea of the floating and layering between pages

some evidence of my text

pity about my reflection - or the cameras' reflection

do love this blue and will intentionally be bringing blue over and through some of my earthy work

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89).  Poems.  1918.

7. God’s Grandeur

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.   It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;   It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;         5   And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;   And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.   And for all this, nature is never spent;   There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;         10 And though the last lights off the black West went   Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs— Because the Holy Ghost over the bent   World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

what not to do .....

I have finally finished my 'burn book'.  Tick.  The books meet on Wednesday and Fiona and I are pretty excited to see what we have come up with, considering the starting point we both had.  This was one of those collaborations in theme and materials and we haven't actually spent time together working on the books so neither of us has any idea what the other book looks like.  There must be a resemblance of course as we are working with the same materials.  Watch out for our posts on Wednesday night.

For the last LONG while it seems, I have been playing with ideas for this book and most of that time seemed to come up with ideas which were much more along the lines of what not to do ....

We are hoping that these two books will form the centrepiece or highlight of our collaboration so it is quite an important book and as such necessitated quite a deal of thought and work.  The photographs below are nothing like my book, but they were very earnest efforts in trying to visualise a way forward.  To no avail.  They make quite interesting photographs though, and maybe on a small scale, would work very beautifully as a book.  But not this time.

As well as learning what not to do, I have learnt a great deal about burning, controlled burning.  Well mostly.  The house remains standing and I still have all my curls and eyebrows.  Seriously though, I have learnt techniques about controlling burns to achieve the effect you are wanting.  Not always easy where paper and fire are involved.

    I am heading off on Thursday for  two weeks.  An artist  friend Steph McLennan  and I are heading
   over to New Zealand to stay at Moeraki on the South Island.  There we will be working with the 
   Moeraki Boulders .... finding heaps of inspiration I hope.

bends not stop signs .....

It is not often that Fiona and I find ourselves on different wavelengths but this was one of those times.  We met today to begin the ninth of our collaborative books.  A burnt book.  My understanding was that we would each burn our pages and then swap half of them  Fiona's was that we would each work on our own pages and then after the exchange, we would burn them!   

Both of us were more than willing to scrap our work and start again but really that is contrary to the nature of our collaboration and so in some manner yet to be determined, we will use my burnt pages and Fiona's written pages, to make our books.  We decided to roll along the bends or curves that have been thrown at us and not see them as stop signs.  Actually we are both pretty excited about this one as it has endless possibilities as we have never imposed rules.

I think it is quite an exciting starting point and my challenge will be to get the book looking like 'me' when Fiona's beautifully strong work is so much her.  As Fiona says - burn and deconstruct. The photographs show this readily and without need for elaboration.  The pages are 50cm by 15cms, seven of them each.  Quite large, but who knows how they will rearrange themselves.

Watch this space but not in any rush as we both have a fairly frenetic time ahead.  The books will meet at the end of January though you may have peeks along the way.