demos and workshops

Well it has been a month since I last posted, where has the time gone? I only had a week away but I've edited a newsletter for IAPMA and a Bulletin for Women's Art Register so have spent a fair bit of time at the computer and I've been planning a few workshops for throughout the year, must update my website once all is finalised. The first one is an oriental binding workshop for the Calligraphy Society of Victoria on Valentine's day then I'm going up to Sydney for a repeat of my armature workshop for the weekend of 13/14 March and the following weekend it's down to Bairnsdale for another armature workshop but since the participants aren't papermakers I've decided to adjust the class and include a couple of light shades I learned from Helen Hiebert.

My copy of Handpapermaking arrived last week and I enjoyed reading the article about Roberto Manino, it reminded me that I'd promised to demonstrate painting with graphite and shellac at the next Papermakers of Victoria meeting (not that Roberto uses graphite and shellac he just uses straight graphite). I'm also considering entering a work in Pameran poskad a postcard show in Singapore. So into the beater with some cotton paper and out with the A6 mould and deckle, I may as well combine the two projects. I made a range of textured sheets some by pouring pulp onto strips of torn blanket and string and others by pressing damp sheets onto a range of objects and into some carved plaster. The untreated pieces in the top photo were done with glow in the dark toys and letters, gutter guard and a latex cast of a tree trunk.

Some of the pieces I coated with gesso but you can see that the top two which had no gesso hold the graphite much better because of the absorbency of the paper. This technique was taught to me by Carol Downey who learned it from Dolph Smith. I need to polish these up a bit and will give the bottom two another coat of graphite and shellac. All I do to get the mix is to mix powdered graphite into made up shellac, I don't know of any formula so I just guess the amounts but it doen't seem to be critical.

The other thing I did last week was to help my daughter hang the work for her first exhibition, here is a picture of Katy and Ash her friend on hanging day. The exhibition is called Somes Lingua (body language in Spanish) and is on at the Fox Hotel in Wellington St Collingwood until 5 February, you can see more of their work on madeit.com.

I am thinking of participating in One World One Heart but haven't decided definitely, not sure I have the time.

last minute card and libris

Tonight we are going to a homecoming celebration for a couple who just got married, our friends daughter married a Sri Lankan and I believe this is a Sri Lankan custom. I bought a gift before Christmas but this morning decided I should make a card to go with it, so I dusted off the vat and grabbed the pulp that was left over from my Christmas cards from the fridge and made some sheets for the basis of the card. Luckily I had some cast pieces from another project so I painted them with irridescent medium this morning and am just waiting for the paper to dry before putting the card together. I have a choice of three symbols, the Maori fish hook or is it a spiral? The fish hook symbolizes prosperity and the spiral new beginnings. Both appropriate for a wedding greeting.

The Hindi prana which means life force.

And the endless knot which according to a book I have called The Secret Language of Symbols means continuity, longevity and eternity also appropriate for a wedding card although I'm not 100% happy with the original carving of this one so I think I'll go with the Maori one.

The paper I made before today's batch was for samples for the Deckle Edge (Papermakers of Victoria magazine) and I made red watermarked banana fibre paper since the next edition is going to be dedicated to banana and I had some in my freezer. Here are the removable watermark templates, blutac on fibreglass flyscreen and the stacks of samples.

The wider strips of blutack showed me where to tear the paper to get five strips per sheet, I tore the strips in half so that 15 sheets gave me the required 150 samples.

I was very disappointed that my book was not accepted into the Libris Awards and my proposal to talk about artists who use handmade paper in their work has been ignored even though I both emailed and posted a copy in good time for the deadline for proposals I haven't even had a response. I was hoping to improve the status of papermaking but I guess that is not going to happen it seems that printmakers do rule! in the Aussie artist book scene anyway.

Here are some pics of my book which is not quite finished but the impetus is gone now, I am waiting for a Japanese translation of the haiku I wrote to go in the book.

Here is the cover of the slipcase made from hemp paper with hemp string embedded inside, the catch is a bone piece with hemp string.

The slipcase is lined with a digital print of ferns on hemp paper and the book is kozo with fern bound with hemp string in a toji or stab binding.

Endpapers have ferns embedded.

Text and images are printed on hemp paper and woven into the kozo pages.

photoshop and christmas

We had our yabbers breakup lunch yesterday and did our card swap, here they are sitting on our piano. They are all very individual and very special.

I made mine from cotton linter beaten together with offcuts of heavyweight Hoshu paper (machine made highly refined kozo). I divided my 15 x 31 cm moulds into three by sewing knitting needles onto the mesh and had precut shapes from oriental paper left over from my ornament book kits and the workshops I did for Art Education Victoria. I placed the shapes on the paper before couching and they became laminated to the paper. Here are some pictures of them drying on the fibro sheets, you can see the lines left by the knitting needles, the paper held together enough to feed through my printer so I could add the greeting then it was easy to work out where to tear the sheets apart. I used a feature I've learned this year of dropping images behind text using the opacity feature in photoshop.

Now to print and send them out!

I thought I'd share the instructions for the ornament books I designed earlier this year so here are the instructions and some pictures showing the folds.

Ornament Book
Materials:
· 5 squares of heavy white paper 10 x 10 cm
· 3 squares of light card 5 x 5 cm
· 2 squares of decorative paper 5 x 5 cm
· 40 cm thread or thin ribbon
· two beads

Tools:
· scissors
· gluestick
· needle for threading thread or ribbon through beads, may not be needed

Method:
· fold each white square in half diagonally

· turn each one over and fold in half both vertically and horizontally

. push the diagonals in so that you end up with a smaller square

· take one of the squares of card and draw your design, note that the design needs to be on the diagonal.
· cut out your design to use as a template
· Cut the design out in the paper squares and glue them together back to back ensuring that the folded corners are aligned
· glue the squares of decorative paper to the remaining two squares of card
· use your template to cut your design from the decorative card making sure that you turn your template upside down for one of the cards so you end up with a front and back cover.
· glue the thread or ribbon to the back cover with the halfway mark at the folded end of your design
· glue on your stack of pages
· glue the thread or ribbon to the top sheet
· glue the front cover on
· press
· thread the ends of the thread or ribbon through a bead
· tie a knot 10cm from the book
· thread the other bead through one strand and tie the thread or ribbon around the bead
· slide the first bead away from the book and turn around so that the covers meet back to back
· slide the bead back to hold the book open.

I learned some cool stuff at this week's photoshop course though I don't quite understand how it works but here are a couple of examples I worked up myself with the original photos included. By the way I was very pleased that I sold the two blueish collages at the Burnley Harbour exhibition last weekend.

Bulletin and other things

Well I finally got the IAPMA Bulletins posted and they are really special, the covers by Helmut Becker took him ages to make, they are beaten hemp with snow retted and running water retted hemp embedded in the paper. There are 15 paper samples and the assembling from printer to post took about 90 person hours, thanks to my friends who came to the various working bees I didn't have to do it all myself otherwise you'd be lucky to get them before Christmas.

I have managed to put together some collages for the Contemporary Art Society exhibition at Burnley Harbour which is on next Friday to Sunday. I have used a sheet of kozo in each and decorative papers for each vessel.


Vessel 1 wax stamp and paper dyes on recycled paper

Vessel 2 indigo and walnut on Belgian flax

Vessel 3 walnut on Belgian flax

Vessel 4 indigo, walnut and rust on Belgian flax

I made some paper the other day for the first time for ages, it was hemp fabric that I finally finished beating when Yabbers went to the Bundoora stables earlier this month, I still don't trust my beater to do hemp, in fact I haven't used it for ages, it did handle recycled paper OK last time I used it. I'm using the hemp paper to print on for a book I'm making at the moment, I'll post some picks once it's made.

I have just started a photoshop course 3 hours a week for four weeks, it looks like we are going to do some fun things, the first session was just getting to know the system and a basic look at layers and shapes. I was going to put up my first project but it's not really worth it, just a couple of shapes. I'm hoping I'll learn how to better adjust the colour in photos that I'm sent for the Bulletin, some are still printing up too dark.

Women's Studio Workshop and Apollo Bay

I have just been watching a couple of videos of the Women's Studio Workshop, the first is a documentary about the workshop and the second show the process of making an edition of 35 copies of an artist book.
Great viewing, I wish I lived closer and could apply for one of their residencies.

Last weekend we ventured down to Apollo Bay for an extended weekend because of Melbourne Cup Day on Tuesday. We had a great time and started the holiday at the opening of Anne Marie & Jo's exhibition at Aireys Inlet, we arrived at the YHA in Apollo Bay too late to cook dinner!! Well that's my theory anyway. We ate at the bottom pub the first night and even though the hostel is well equipped with two kitchens and even a herb garden we only breakfasted there, it was a real holiday. Sunday we went for a drive and a hike up in the Otways, they are amazingly green at the moment, all very lush and the waterfalls were wonderful, lots of water. Monday we went back into Lorne for their sculpture festival and walked from one end of Lorne to the other then back again, saw some terrific sculptures and of course we couln't visit Lorne without a visit to Qdos gallery where there was a show of Marny Fenton's found object sculptures and Mary Cooke's photographs. On Tuesday before we came home we visited the Cape Otway Lighthouse and just about got blown off, gale force winds are anything over 35 knots apparently and these were 50 knots, just amazing and the sea was so wild. I haven't even looked at my photos yet but I am hoping to put together an artwork for a friends apartment near Apollo Bay. The other project I have on the go at the moment is to make some paper from Mulberry bast, I'll start cooking that tomorrow.