Book Studio

Goodness, at this rate, we might be a bit of an annual blog!

Well, this year in the Book Studio, we have a resident ANU Creative Fellow: Michael Callaghan of Redback Graphix.

We also expect to host artists Laura Stekovic and Antonia Aitkin, and poet Angela Gardner.

On top of that, the Book Design Complementary Unit students might get on here and have a play if I can inspire them enough.

I won’t make promises, though, but keep checking back, just in case

The Book Studio is pleased to announce the completion of the edition of visiting artist GW Bot’s artist book, Black Swan.

Black Swan features a Russian poem about Australia, written in 1912 by Konstantin Dmitrievich Bal’mont (1867-1942). The Russian text was translated into English by Sasha Grishin, and both versions were set in Times on a Mac computer, cast in photopolymer plate and printed using a letterpress process by Caren Florance.

With linocut illustrations cut and printed by Bot herself, there were 19 books produced, although it is not known at present how many will be in the final edition.

The paper used is a Magnani partially formed from wool fibres. The binding, by Caren Florance, is a traditional sewn hard case binding using Tapa cloth laminated onto black Chelsea bookcloth (there is a detail of the cover at the foreground of the image below).

The British Library and the National Library of Australia have both bought copies, and there is an article featuring Black Swan in the Winter 2007 edition (vol 42, no. 4, p. 18) of Imprint, the Quarterly Journal of the Print Council of Australia. The copy of Black Swan in this article is a hand-written version, sent to be part of Noreen Grahame’s group exhibition Lessons in History Vol. 1 (24/3/07–28/4/07, in Brisbane). The printed copy of the book was meant to be finished in time for the exhibition, but due to various setbacks, it could not be competed at that point.

For further details on the book, please contact the Book Studio. Any purchasing enquiries will be directed by the Studio to the artist.

A group of Honours students in the painting workshop have produced their own zine, titled (at last notice) dot dot dot. Consisting purely of drawings photocopied in both colour and black & white, they saved their text for the cover, which was set in metal type and printed using letterpress in the Book Studio.

Erik Krebs-Schade and Tiffany Cole of the Painting Workshop proudly holding a copy of the zine cover, fresh off the press and still wet. Erik set most of the type.

A view of the type form, clamped up (flipped in Photoshop to allow normal reading, as it usually reads back-to-front and upside-down). We printed 2-up onto A3 paper to fold down to A5 size.

The covers, drying en masse in the racks.

The zine artists were: Tim Price, Erik Krebs-Schade, Tiffany Cole, Kalina Pilat, and Della Jackson. The project was co-ordinated by Raquel Ormella of the Painting Workshop with printing help from Caren Florance of the Book Studio.

The zine was produced in an edition of about 270, and was launched at the Zine Fair of the 2006 This Is Not Art festival in Newcastle.

In this second half of the year our visiting artist is GW Bot, prominent Australian printmaker who has done some incredible things with the medium of linocut printing.

Bot is coming in one day a week to work on a limited edition artist’s book to be called Black Swan. The book uses three translations of a Russian poem about Australia by Konstantin Dmitrievich Bal’mont (1867-1942): English, Russian and Bot’s own visual ‘language’ (an example of which is pictured below, as linocuts ready for proofing).

The English text will be handset in Times roman (below), and the Russian has been cast on photopolymer plates, to be printed as relief plates on the letterpress press.

We are at the point of proofing the plates and text, and if all goes well, the book will be ready and bound by late November. The edition is expected to be 12 copies.

In 1st Semester 2006, the School of Art Painting Workshop hosted Hossein Valamanesh as an Artist in Residence. During his residency he wanted to work with large pieces of unleavened bread and sought a way of flattening his bread under weights. Somehow his search led him to the Book Studio, and our large drying cabinet. Over the next month or so Hossein became an informal but regular visitor to the Studio, trying different ways to dry, flatten and then mount the pieces so that they could be framed without falling apart.

Hossein used the bread as a canvas to paint with pure saffron mixed to an ‘ink’ with water. He painted very elaborate Sufi calligraphy, spelling the word ‘love’ over and over. When I questioned this, he replied ‘Bread and Love — everybody needs it, every day’. Some of the bread pieces worked, others fell apart, which instigated a whole other way of looking at the work, and will lead to ongoing explorations. Towards the end of his stay, we ate a few pieces of the fragments, and the taste of the pure saffron was such a wonderful experience that he used a number of the pieces as an ‘eat your art out’ feature of his farewell party.

Hossein enjoyed the Book Studio so much that he used the letterpress equipment to produce a small edition called ‘In Praise of the Beloved’, which had two almonds in their shells adorned with fake eyelashes attached to the paper with the title printed underneath in handset letterpress. Deceptively simple, and very beautiful, like so much of his work.

(top image: Hossein at work with saffron while John Pratt prints in the background. Bottom image: bread in progress.)