Walk forward and see how far we can go.

Paper by Dianne Fogwell

First National Artists' Books Forum

Friday6 February 2004

Artspace Mackay

The Edition + Artist Book Studio is at the coalface of making. I am talking to you as a practicing visual artist (in my role as Lecturer in Charge) who has managed to carve a place, a kind of tunnel between academic, theoretical issues and commercial interests in the medium of the artist book.

E+ABS is a studio space within the ANU School of Art, which aims to produce selective commercial editions alongside of more experimental works with professional artists and postgraduate students and alumni of the school. Set up in 1996, it was made possible by grasping a number of lucky opportunities as they arose: the physical space made available, a shift in academic interests, changes in political climate. Due to my experience in collaboration with artists and running both private and institutional studios, I was asked to expand the program to include research applications. I was given a room, 6 hrs a week face to face, a technical assistant for 5 hrs a week, a small Macintosh computer, some letterpress equipment and two relief presses inherited from the Graphic Investigation Workshop. The emphasis was on artistic freedom; a chance to open a path to creative expression and to create an intellectual yet completely practical learning environment. Our basic equipment has expanded as needs required, (a polymer plate making machine with expanded desktop facilities) as has our links with the commercial print industry, but we have always maintained a balance between practical capability and theoretical space.

The studio has a strong philosophical base, building on a tradition established by distinguished predecessors in the School of Art, notably Udo Sellbach, Jorg Schmeisser and Petr Herel, who formed and fostered the Graphic Investigation and the Printmaking Workshops. Both workshops were 'created in a climate when conceptual and post-object art in Australia had ceased to be ostracised and when printmaking could no longer be confined to specific mediums … [they] fostered an artistic sensibility, a sense of technical excellence and the questioning of the traditional litany of printmaking and its medium categories.' GIW focussed on delivering knowledge about what was happening with the book internationally; the Printmaking Workshop moved in their own direction, moving outwards to explore Australia's cultural identity, forging strong relationships with Aboriginal communities, discovering new ways to utilise traditional methodologies.

With the Book Studio, I have acknowledged these approaches – European sensibility and Australian cultural exploration – with respect, but also to merge and move through to something different, something broad and challenging. The ANU School of Art under the direction of Professor David Williams recognised the achievements of the GIW and Printmaking within art and academic spheres and set up the Book Studio to provide a research arm to compliment them. EABS, post-1999 and the restructure of these departments into the Printmedia and Drawing Workshop, exists as a continuing commitment by the ANU School of Art to the idea of the artist book as a valid and important part of the art academic curriculum, offering specialised study for honours and graduate students with expanded alumni residency. It is a place where professional artists and students can learn about the art form, and challenge, expand and develop those notions with artistic integrity.

Sasha Grishin has said:

The artist book is a peculiar animal, almost by definition a collaborative venture, where text and art retain a certain equilibrium -- a balanced tension. The Edition +Artist Book Studio ... is also a peculiar animal. Unlike other workshops at the [ANU School of Art], its primary functions lie neither in teaching or offering degrees, but in fostering a collaborative environment where Australian and international artists collaborate with the school's staff and students to make art mainly in the form of artist books and prints.

I like the word peculiar, because it is a great alternative to that cliché unique. The Book Studio is an ongoing experiment, and I am constantly reinventing it to accommodate the changing needs of academia, the expectations of the art world, the needs of artists, and monetary demands. Right now it is again shifting in a new direction. I will go further into that in a moment, but I wanted to speak first about how we at EABS work with the idea of the artist book and how the very existence of EABS allows that idea to become reality.

The EABS is primarily artist-driven. It aims to give established artists the opportunity to work with each other in a quiet and contemplative space, and to involve less experienced artists in the daily running of the studio. It's a win-win situation, as the younger artists gain knowledge and the older – I'm speaking in terms of experience here, not years – have assistance and sometimes a fresh viewpoint and access to new technologies.

The artist's residencies were originally linked to the artist's studio within the EABS being available to visiting artists to the School. This has brought sculptors, glass-artists, painters, and silversmiths into our sphere. Publications were generated by inviting artists to join us to undertake a project. This meant introducing professional artists with little or no book history (with the exception of Bruno Leti) to new ideas. We aim to encourage artists to leave 'the safety and the self-imposed limitations of their traditional mediums to achieve in the freedom of experimentation a new awareness of their own and of each other's creative possibilities'.

The Studio has produced 60-odd publications, of which 32 are artist books or portfolios the others limited edition prints. It has been an intense experience. Others feel this too. John Thompson said talking with me about the studio was ' a heady experience.' Barbara Campbell said her experience was 'exotic and exhausting' and compared it to her recent trip to New Guinea. Helen Geier has called making her first portfolio in the studio 'grueling but fascinating'. It comes from asking artists to go one more step so they can learn something new. You're putting them in unfamiliar and sometimes uncomfortable territory. John Thompson also said that our artists are 'set down in a new country where they must learn all over again how to operate and function … the challenge is both a technical one and to work successfully on an intimate level of inquiry'.

EABS is a one-on-one experience, which is then linked with the necessary technical skills and support. When asked the right question, artists have the curious ability to be drawn to a challenge and find a new perspective. Most artists arrive with 'untrained' hands; they walk in full of the current concerns within their practice, but with no or few preconceived ideas about how the outcome will be. I take time with them to listen and understand a possible direction.

A good early example is John Reid's book Half-cast Tone from 1996. John has a history of working with type; he's an artist instrumental in the late 70's experimental art movement with relatively unknown skills in graphic design but is well known for his photography. When I discovered that the font process in Letraset's Letrographica range was designed by John Reid, I invited him to produce a work based on a reappraisal of this font. Though a multimedia artist, he had not worked within this perimeter before. It is a minimal work, which photographs badly! It included the use of metal, silk, and several photographic and printmaking processes, finally culminating into a silent, embossed concrete poem. A floor or wall piece.

At the same time, we started a piece by ANU Creative Arts Fellow at the time, Robin Wallace-Crabbe. Titled 'Scratchings: A brief account of interloping with a pristine etching plate in hand and other matters' (1996-7). Robin is well known as a painter, printmaker and general man of letters. I wanted to listen to him before I started to suggest possibilities regarding the architecture of the work and what he wanted to achieve. It seemed the images needed to be still as he was running from office to office to make portraits of prominent academics within the university, and the text needed to flow to echo his abundant rhetoric. This culminated in loose-leaf portraits with a five-metre concertina text housed in a grey serge suit-cloth wrap. He described working with me thus:

She's got a very droll and complex personality, and with every plate she forced me to reconsider and not just rush through and edition it. "Do you think a little bit of aquatint here?" I'd say "No, I don't think so," so she'd take me out and give me a cup of tea and then come back as though she'd never asked. "Do you think a little bit of aquatint here?"

It was a real eye-opener for me. She could put on aquatints that I wouldn't be able to get an image from. She forced me…"Just dip it in for four seconds and pull it out" … and there'd be just like a watercolour wash, no more, on the surface; and when she was inking up and wiping off, she'd get that perfectly printed. She could do that again and again.

The studio was able to edition an unprinted plate of the late Noel Counihan, 'Laughing Christ'. Due to Counihan's commitment to the school as Council Board member and significant supporter of the printmaking movements in Australia, I wanted someone to pay homage to this particular work. Bernard Hardy, poet and painter, was someone I knew would take on the challenge. What resulted was a series of poems and etchings titled 'Meditation on Noel Counihan's Laughing Christ'.

Having been a little doubtful at first about writing in response to a commission, Hardy was surprised at the depth of his emotional engagement with Counihan's Christ, an image which contrasted strongly with that artist's more established realist style. In the end, the drama of that contrast, a microcosm of one of the great dialectics of world history, caught Hardy's attention. He found himself responding to the image in autobiographical terms recalling the tensions of his Melbourne schooldays between the two competing worldviews of Catholicism and Communism, a debate that also exercised a profound influence on Counihan. For Hardy, the writing of his Meditations assumed the power of a personal catharsis while also bringing him to a renewed appreciation of Counihan's intense humanity as it came to be reflected in his art.

Helen Geier became an artist in residence as a School of Art Visiting Fellow and came with an established relationship with the poet Rhyll McMaster. They had previously worked on an artist book with Studio One called 'Experiments and Games of Chance'. Helen's paintings were very clearly on where perspective had provided order to the natural world, and Rhyll had just published her collection Chemical Bodies. In this case, problem posed was to provide an unbound work where one poem led a suite of images. The work was called 'Expanded Fields' and the poem was titled 'In which Reality is a collusion between minds and what is out there.' In that poem she writes:

What is real/ in this bare/ mathematical field/ is the hard/ blunt tip of my boot/ enlarged as if under/ a magnifying lens.

The poem was set on an embossed page, which became the typography of the grid structure. The images were made from photographic plates of paper constructions, origami of a 17th century book on perspective. Helen Geier is currently working in the studio as a result of being awarded an artsACT Fellowship.

Projects are not only collaborations but also relationships. An ongoing project with photographer and writer, Sally McInerney, was initiated in 1999 and will be completed this year. We meet for 2 days every 2 or 3 months. The artist found a box of half-destroyed family photographs – hence the title, Family Fragments. Included in this box were six unpublished photos by her mother, the late Olive Cotton and others by family members and unknown photographers. Sally scanned the photos and discovered that the printer shifted the memories by alternately smoothing out or deepening the flaws in the images. The photos were then taken to the relevant person to unravel the story. She came to me with some printed photo-polymer plates and a box of typewriter memoirs by herself in conversation with the others, a rare insight into a part of Australia's artistic and a personal family history. This has resulted in an extensive artist's book including intaglio photo-polymer and letterpress, boxed in silk.

Sometimes the book is a play on an idea, sometimes it is a journey into materials. Katherine Nix, a notable papermaker, who contributed considerably to the school's papermaking facility, was asked to be an artist in residence within the studio. Up to now, in EABS, paper had been used for its traditional role as something to print text upon. I was curious to find out what Katherine would do with the space to create rather than the obligation to teach. Katherine is known for artist books and has an exception skill in the watermark. She chose a fable, The Three Roses, written by her son Garth Nix, which is a tale of love set in a medieval land. This idea of fantasy and fantastique would allow Katherine to pursue and elaborate and sensuous journey, creating textures and light through images, at a scale which gave a presence which had not been seen before. She says

I found there was a parallel to fantasy writing in the making of The Garden [the final title of her book]. In the producing of any artist book, we do not have to conform to a particular craft or fine art stereotype, as conventional rules do not apply. At the same time we can draw from the whole rich and diverse history of books, from illuminated medieval manuscripts and tales of chivalry to desktop pamphlets.

Though the book has been a marginal artform, it has gained credibility over the years within the Australian arts bureaucracy. There has been a shift with publications such as Imprint with regular articles and galleries, who now have exhibitions of books, aligning them with competitions for artist books, and the fact that we are here at the first national forum on artist books is also testament to this developing awareness. In 2000, I received a Fellowship from the Capital Arts Patrons Organisation specifically to create an artist book within the EABS, the first for the studio. This Fellowship enabled me to afford to collaborate and pay a composer, an editor, twelve musicians, a recording studio, a typographer to print over 90 pages of handset type in the limited edition and a commercial printing enterprise. This was a big work, and marks a shift in the funding possibilities for larger, more complex works within the studio. Prior to this, publications were commissioned or self-funded. A number of artists since have received grants from various Government bodies to work within the Studio.

Andrew Powell is one such artist. He was funded for a six-month residency to produce an artist book titled Forecast. This allowed him the intellectual space to play. It was an experiment with an open-ended approach. It included walking in the bush, etchings of obliterated text from his head, and observing the cars outside his window. Andrew is sometimes placed under the title of Primitive, primarily a painter though has been known for his works made in and inspired from the environment. The notion of an ordered, predesigned environment such as the book was exceptionally difficult. Pages were not stitched, but bolted together between cloth and paper that resembled mud-sodden terrain.

Jan Brown, a sculptor whose primary material base is bronze, also embarked upon a two-year residency within the studio. Trained at the Slade School under Henry Moore, Jan's approach to drawing was essential to the architecture of the book. This is what John Thompson, who wrote the book's postscript; 'A Eulogy in Mourning' had to say about the book in our Survey Exhibition Catalogue:

The sculptor Jan Brown has been encouraged to break free from her three-dimensional artform, the monumental studies of birds by which she is best known, to produce a powerful series of prints which have their origin in her passionate love for the known birds which visit her Canberra garden, intimate and personal as friends. In turn, Brown's prints enrich and extend a moving and sonorous text composed by the poet Ian Templeman. But which comes first, text or image? In this context that distinction is irrelevant, since the two forms work together as complements, one to the other.

The publication had to reflect the weight, the placement and attention to detail Jan gives to her subject matter.

This collaboration between Jan and Ian Templeman continues in 2004 with the production of another book, this time on the theme of Icarus, with two poems written by Ian enfolded with a number of graphic explorations by Jan. It sustains the Studio's interest in text, and particularly with poetry. This year EABS is launching a series of accessible yet innovative poetry volumes inspired by the academic journals Visible Language, under the title, Poet Selects. The outside appearance will be consistent, in the manner of a shelf series, with the internal architecture varying according to the combination of poet and their text. This is part of the current direction of the Studio, with a clarification of the roles within the space; a distinct typesetting area and expanded editioning facilities, combined with a changed timetable structure, which spreads these activities across the working week. There will be more alumni residencies, broader links with industry and non-institutional printmaking facilities, resulting in a more flexible technical base.

In conclusion, the Edition + Artist Book Studio continues to evolve, to consider itself an ongoing experiment rather than a static institutional facility. It will continue to build on its strength of having many diverse artistic voices which are allowed to co-exist, and working within tradition without being traditional. My overriding philosophy is to continue to walk forward and see how far we go.

Dianne Fogwell has been an exhibiting artist since 1979. An invited artist to international biennials for print and the artist book in Poland, Belgium, Belgrade, France and London. Her work is represented in national and international collections. Her involvement in print collaboration with visual artists, musicians and writers spans two decades where she has been the master printer for over 200 editions for prominent Australian artists and curator/co-curator for major exhibitions in the field of print and book. Her dedication to printmaking and the artists’ book led her to be co-founder of Studio One and Founder/Director of the Criterion Press and Fine Art Gallery. From 1996 she has been Lecturer in Charge of the Edition + Artists Book Studio (EABS) within the School of Art, NITA, the Australian National University, Canberra.