Contemporary Arts Society Annual Exhibition

 

I have submitted two of my cyanotypes from the three rivers exhibition and several unframed pieces with plant material embedded in mitsumata paper. Plus ten of these cards will be available for just $4 each.

Pear Prints

I just noted that it is almost a year since I posted so thought it was time for another. It isn't that I haven't done anything in a year but there have been a few changes around here, the biggest is that my partner has retired. Last year I taught a few workshops and spent quite a bit of time making preparations and samples for these. So far this year I have three workshops scheduled the first was last weekend and it was making paper from denim and making books based on the accordion or concertina structure. In preparation I made quite a lot of denim pulp and a blank accordion that I thought I should add some prints to. I pulled out some old lino and MDF cuts and printed them onto some 300 gsm hahnemuhle that I had left over from another project.

I had a whole set of pear prints but at the same time we had lots of pears on our tree and the lorikeets were really getting stuck into them so we picked them all even though they were very green. I figured I'd try cutting one in half and printing from it and I had a lovely time and was pretty pleased with the results.

Then I made some collages and made some cards with pear prints.

My first accordion I filled with collages and pear prints.

The next two are blank inside and have pear prints and collage on the covers.

CAS brooch show and some nature printing experiments

The Contemporary Art Society of Victoria has a brooch show opening on the 1st of June and since members get to enter for no charge I thought I should participate. I made three brooches from paper pulp pressed into carved plaster that I coated with shellac and graphite then acrylic paint then scraped back some of the paint.

Fossil 15#3

Fossil 15#2

Fossil 15#1

The fourth brooch was one of my experiments with nature printing and embossing. I inked up a parsley seed head with waterless block printing ink then made a small sheet of paper from recycled abaca and pressed the inked seed head into the paper and dried it on a sheet of fibro cement. I then gave it a few coats of shellac then sewed seed beads on. 

Seed

I tried a few different ferns as well as the seed heads and then I also printed onto some mixed fibre sheets I had made as samples for the workshop I am running in early July, Journey; an Artist Book from Go to Whoa.

Fishbone fern on recycled abaca

Sunday workshop and a book finally made

I started this post nearly a week ago but somehow none of it saved so here goes again.
I am teaching a workshop for Papermakers of Victoria this coming Sunday and we are doing acetate etching (although it is perhaps more correctly acetate engraving). I have done a bit with sheets of thickish acetate scratching the surface with an awl and that is what we will be concentrating on however I have also been playing around using an engraver on perspex and was happy with the results so we will do some of that too.
Here are a few that I did with the acetate:-

And these ones I did with the perspex and the engraver.

Some time ago I blogged about a workshop I did with Velma Bolyard in February this year, well it took getting together with Chris to bind our PoV snake books (from longer ago, last December!) to finally bind the second book of pages that were in the blue tones. Some I dipped in indigo but I also slipped in a few cyanotypes and other bits and pieces.

This book will be going to Fabriano to the IAPMA congress for the silent auction and I have started work on my keepsakes, I have enough of the plant fibre paper that is a mix of papyrus and New Zealand flax both of which got well washed and bleached somewhat by the rain. I have made my two plates from easy cut rubbery material and done a trial print, the next challenge is to see if they will overprint without too much slippage.

The snake book bound! At last.

                                    

My page on right, the back of Chris's on the left

More of my page, all the paper is yukka, the top sheet has been momigamied with arrowroot paste and the bottom sheet has daphne bast fibre added and has a lino print.

Mind you while I am mucking around with this blog I should be either printing my keepsakes, binding some eco books or preparing the catalogue for the Congress members show. I had better get back to at least one of these!!!

Fungi and Glen Skien

Sorry for the delay in posting this the workshop was nearly a month ago and I have been meaning to post but have run out of time each time I get to the computer. Anyway the workshop was terriffic AND I have produced something that I'm happy with. I had decided that my theme would be fungi so I had lots of photos of different fungi from my garden and one particular variety got very large so I made some paper from them without cooking just blending the fibre. I did this about four days before the workshop then the day before tried to peel the fungi paper off the cloths. The fibres were so short it would only come off in tiny pieces so the day before the workshop I thought I'd better do something about it. Luckily I had a couple of vats with recycled pulp up in my shed (and they were'nt TOO smelly) so I made recycled and couched it directly on to the fungus paper and quickly dried it out overnight. I loved the resultant paper.

The fungus I used started like this:-

And ended like this:-

I only took one photo during the workshop of Glen demonstrating the monoprints.

I teastained some of the Hannemuhle I had brought to work on then set about collaging lots of sheets with unbleached tissue paper that I was given at the workshop in Bairnsdale, kozo, my fungus paper, some other plantfibre paper, FDH stamps and cutouts of fungus shapes. I didn't start any printing until late on the first day. I started by using my photographs by cutting out the fungus and using both the positive and negative shapes as both blockout and stamp (not sure what to call that, the photo was covered with ink which was transferred to the collaged paper). A couple of the others in the class had natural materials to print from so I used some of those and some from the garden. The stamping/nature printing was more successful than the blockout printing.
By the end of the second day I had twelve sections of between two and three sheets. I bound them all together into one book but wasn't happy with that so when I got home I cut the binding up and rebound into seven little books of two sections each.

I also decided that they looked a little dirty so decided to add some colour by rusting them. Out came the Ferric sulphate and caustic soda and into the tubs went the little books. I dried them on sheets of cartridge paper which I later bound into books (next post!)

I then made a slip case for the set of books cannibalising one for the lining of the case.