Book Studio

Bernie Slater, last year’s Graduate Resident in the Book Studio, and Julian Laffan, who will be the Book Studio Grad Resident next semester, have work in the latest exhibition at the ANU School of Art Gallery, Thresholds of Tolerance. They are part of a collective called Culture Kitchen, incorporating Australian, East Timorese and Indonesian artists, raising awareness of human rights issues in the Australasian region. The series of images, printed onto large (and portable!) white sheets using various techniques such as woodblock, screenprinting and stencil spraying, are titled We Refuse to be Victims.

They have just been profiled on triplej, and you may catch them talking on the radio over the next few days. If you are in Canberra it is worth a trip to the gallery to see the real thing and to see the video footage the Australian team shot whilst travelling through the region. The exhibition is on until 5 June 2007.

Here is a round-up of Book Studio-connected exhibitions:

The touring exhibition of the Studio’s previous incarnation, the Edition + Artist Book Studio, has opened in Melbourne at the State Library of Victoria. ‘How I entered there I cannot truly say’: Collaborative Works from the ANU Edition + Artist Book Studio is running until 17 June 2007 in the SLV’s Keith Murdoch Gallery. The opening day was celebrated with a full day of talks and panels on the various natures of the Artist Book, featuring artists like Peter Lyssiotis, Gracia + Louise, Carolyn Fraser and George Matoulis. Sacha Grishin gave the keynote speech: ‘Both a picture and a thousand words: Contemporary Artist Books’.

There are ongoing activities associated with the exhibition, including a children’s workshop and an advanced printing workshop at the Australian Print Workshop with Dianne Fogwell. You can explore all the options and also listen to a downloadable audio tour for the exhibition at the SLV’s website.

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Dianne Fogwell, the curator of the E+ABS touring exhibition, is travelling to Korea to exhibit at the 2007 Seongnam International Book Arts Fair (S.I.S.F.). According to their blurb, the Seongnam International Book Arts Fair opens to celebrate the first anniversary of the Book Theme Park under the auspices of Seongnam Cultural Center, Saturday April 21, 2007 to Monday April 30, 2007 at the Yeul-dong park in Book Theme Park.
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Patsy Payne, the Head of the Printmedia & Drawing Workshop and current lecturer-in-charge of the Book Studio, is exhibiting in Sydney until 31 March. The show, Mountain Building, is at the Brenda May Gallery, 2 Danks Street, Waterloo, open 11-6, Tues-Sat.

On the night of the 28th of February the art school was hit by a freak supercell thunderstorm. Four feet of hail clogged the school’s downpipes and consequently torrential rain had nowhere to go but through the inside of the two-storey school. Three weeks later we are still mopping up, and the damage will take months to repair.

The Book Studio was flooded, but damage was confined to a few works on paper and some of the MDF furniture. Both presses seem ok, although we do have to watch for future rust, and miraculously, all the computers and our brand-new inkjet printer escaped harm.

This view is after the pool of water was sucked out; there are typecases drying out and damaged works being investigated. The top of the metal letterpress cabinet (centre-ish) is totally orange with rust.

We are hosting a workshop for the ANG print symposium (details to follow), and hopefully all will be back to relative normality by that time.

For your one-stop shop of traditional bookbinding and book repair instructions, go to the Indiana University Libraries website, Repair and Enclosure Treatments Manual. It has a wide variety of techniques, clearly illustrated and explained.

The Book Complimentary class have been playing with pop-up books over this last semester; here are some paper links for future reference. If you know of others, please share them with us!

• Robert Sabuda’s pop-up cards with instructions and templates
• John Patience’s pop-up book resource page
• Peter Callesen’s paper engineering
• Paperform paper design & engineering
• Chinese paper folds & cuts
• Tarquin books on paper engineering and pop-ups
• A reference page on Chinese papercuts of all kinds

The Book Studio has just inherited a mystery tool and would love to have the mystery solved.

Here it is, sitting on an A4 sheet of paper, to give an idea of its proportions:

Heavy (solid iron handle), with two unpainted metal panels on the sides bolted on and holding the ‘axle’, the head is shaped for a specific purpose, including levelled-off ‘feet’ to allow the tool to be sat on a flat surface a certain way up when not used.

Each of those toothed circles, and the plain circles between them move independently in either direction without resistance (the centre is actually two roundels, I just forgot to stagger them when taking the shot). The teeth in each circle aren’t the same size as you turn them around. On one circle the teeth have miniscule differences; on another they graduate from very thin through to a medium size.

The brand is Huntingdon woops, HUNTINGTON, and on the next side of the handle (which is diamond-shaped, not square) is a large ‘B1′.

The tool used to belong to the Graphic Investigation Workshop, one of the precursors to the Book Studio. GIW was a Canberra Art School department, for 20 years under the leadership of Petr Herel, a Czech artist who brought his European artist’s book sensibility to Australia long before Australians had any concept of a book being more than just something to read. GIW focussed on drawing as a philosophy, the book as a wide-ranging concept, and poetry as mandatory to creative life.

If the tool came from GIW, it could be to do with printing presses, papermaking equipment, letterpress, or just picked up by someone and kept as an interesting object. Could it have been used for calibration or measurement? Does anyone know?

POSTSCRIPT: Thanks to Norm and Foo who identified the tool as a grinder dressing tool, to keep grinding wheels buffed and rough.  We may still have the wheel it fits, if we’re lucky!

The ANU School of Art is having an Open Day on this Saturday, August 26 from 9am to 4pm, along with the rest of the university.

The Book Studio, upstairs in the Printmedia & Drawing Workshop, will be open and operational, and there will numerous activities throughout the Workshop itself, including demonstrations of various print techniques, a print sale, t-shirt sale, plate-drawing stall and a sausage sizzle.

The Book Studio has been printing cloth serviettes to add to the sausage sizzle, cut from white cotton drill and printed with letterpress ink (which, from long experience, does not wash out!). Here are a few samples:

We’ve also printed a few items of clothing, just for fun.

Open Day is a fantastic way to see the School of Art in operation. There are activities happening in all workshops: Printmedia, Photomedia, Painting, Ceramics, Glass, Textiles, Furniture, Gold & Silversmithing, and Sculpture. There is also the judging of the annual Student Drawing Prize in the Gallery, as well as many opportunities to buy or win artworks.

If you’re in the Canberra region, this is a great way to spend your Saturday, no matter the weather.

If books had been invented after the computer, they would have been considered a big breakthrough. Books have several hundred simultaneous paper-thin, flexible displays. They boot instantly. They run on very low power at a very low cost.

Prof. Joseph M. Jacobson, MIT Media Lab, quoted in the N. Y. Times, Apr 8, 1988, page B2.

Watch this space for news and images from this small corner of a Canberra art school. Thanks for dropping by.