After Robert Heather kindly invited me to open this exhibition, I dutifully trotted over to Di Fogwell’s studio to speak to her as the exhibition’s curator and as the “artistic director” of the Australian National University’s Editions + Artist Book Studio from 1996 to the present, the decade covered by this exhibition.  What I learnt from her was that this exhibition is fairly comprehensive of the work produced in the Studio, with relatively few works excluded, and that her primary philosophy in dealing with artists while working with the Studio was, in her words, “I’ve tried to lay off other people’s children”. 
A courteous and professional response, but one which hardly assisted me in what I took to be as my main task tonight, to make sense of this exhibition in about 15 minutes to a broader audience.  Having failed to find a satisfactory answer through the interrogation of the oracle, I abandoned the authorial discourse and turned instead to the interrogation of the art objects themselves.  In terms of the artists involved, the exhibition seemed to fall into four rather broad categories.  Firstly, there were the artists who through residencies or projects were invited to make work in the Studio.  Some of the prominent artist printmakers include Udo Sellbach, Robin Wallace-Crabbe, Lukas Kandl, Helen Geier, Bruno Leti, Martin King, Ros Atkins, Euan Heng, Inge King, Andrew Powell and Fiona Foley.  Secondly, there was the staff of the ANU School of Art – amongst them, we have almost a mini-retrospective of the work of Di Fogwell from this decade, major work by Katharine Nix, as well as works by Petr Herel, Meg Buchanan, Jörg Schmeisser, John Pratt, Patsy Payne and Danie Mellor – all recognised printmakers, as well as others, including Bob Boynes, Jan Brown, the late Stephen Proctor and the late David Watt, who were on the staff of the School of Art at the time, but who were not primarily known as printmakers. 

Thirdly, there were the commissioned portfolios, including that of the Maningrida Women’s Centre and individual commissions from high profiled artists such as Jason Benjamin and Margaret Olley.  Finally, there were quite a number of works by honours students, graduates and from various residencies, including those by Phil Day, Ingeborg Hansen, Bjarni Wark, Bernadette Crockford, Tanya Myshkin and Gaye Paterson.  This is by no means a comprehensive list and I’m not suggesting that these are hard and fast categories with impervious boundaries, but it does provide us with a bit of an idea of the state of play which prevailed in the studio over this decade.
So unlike the Australian Print Workshop or Port Jackson Press, where there has to be a primary concern with returning a profit, this Studio is very much an academic institution, where the projects are frequently experimental, challenging and problematic.  In many instances, it is what I would term, research-lead art making, strong in its sense of discovery and the exploration of self.  Also, unlike many art school Printmaking Workshops, where the various mediums of printmaking and the idea of exchange portfolios is common place, the ANU Studio apart from leaning on a printmaking background was also built on the heritage of Petr Herel’s Graphic Investigation Workshop, where artists books with their dependency on the word were central to its practice.  So Di Fogwell inherited an asset poor, but tradition rich heritage, and the peculiar blend in this exhibition of about half artists books and half editioned prints and portfolios is a vivid reflection of this heritage.

Now I am starting to climb even further out on a limb.  While I hasten to point out that in this exhibition there is no house style and there is a diversity and pluralism which speak of an individuality of artistic practice within the Studio, but there also seems to be, at least to me, some sort of interconnecting thread, one that deals with process, philosophy of art making where there is a shared approach to problem solving and even to some extent with a shared sensibility.  This notion of collaboration is not that of the silent sleeper as in the case of Ken Tyler and his famous proclamation “tell me what you want to do and the answer is yes”, but it is a collaboration where there is a certain polyvalency.  What may not be apparent to many of you from this exhibition is that Di Fogwell, apart from her stripes as an artist, is an absolutely brilliant master printer.  When she was still in nappies, in terms of her art, back in Wagga Wagga, Euan Heng tossed her a plate and said “print this”, and now more than  25 years later she is still doing this.  Over the years in various of workshops I have seen her print work as diverse as that by Petr Herel, Jörg Schmeisser and Helen Geier, all done with exceptional mastery.  It is her infectious ability to enter into the spirit of the artist’s work and to set up a spirit of collaboration which is one of the distinguishing features of the Studio and this exhibition. 
The exhibition opens with Udo Sellbach’s monumental statement of affirmation of being, an artists book or, in his own words a book of visual ideas based on a line from Dante’s XXVIII canto from the Inferno "Who could ever fully tell, even in unfettered words, though many times narrating, the blood and the wounds that I now saw?  Surely every tongue would fail, because of our speech and our memory which have little capacity to comprehend so much." Dante's tongue does not fail him and in one beautifully evocative line he declares: "I saw it in all certainty - and still I see it."  For Sellbach “And still I see it”, which he executed in 1995, contains all of the dark imagery of a Goya, where memories of his own childhood in war-time Germany combine with the travesties of the modern world.  From 1997, in this exhibition we have Bernard Hardy’s Meditations on Noel Counihan’s Laughing Christ, Lukas Kandl’s exquisite surreal pear and Tanya Myshkin’s marvellous wood engravings to the Three poems by Francis Webb with that most magical trembling intensity which is characteristic of her art. 

The following year, 1998, there is Helen Geier’s masterwork, Expanded Field, which engages with the verse of Rhyll McMaster, in which both the poet and the artist examine the question of the impact of imposed orderings and rationalist epistemologies, on vision, on the act of seeing and on aspects of nature.  In 1999 the Studio was involved with Bruno Leti’s magnificent The Alignments One and Two accompanied by the lyrics of Chris Wallace-Crabbe.  By 2000 there was Jan Brown’s A particular raven with the verse of Ian Templeman and in 2001-02 Katharine Nix’s autographic The Garden. 
In a curious way, for all of these artists, the work which they executed in the Studio, was not typical of their usual production.  They felt challenged and extended, they moved out of their comfort zone, they were pushed, occasionally annoyed and frustrated, but constantly inspired to try out something different.  I say this, in part, because the visual evidence that is before us in this exhibition, in part, because of private privileged knowledge of having worked with each one of these artists, together with many others, in this show.  What I am relaying is their common memory of the Studio and of the experience of working with Di Fogwell, her printers, binders, designers and other collaborators.  The Studio over this ten year period has become an experimental workshop, where artists are respected, yet challenged, where the academic institutional nature is used as an asset, rather than as a hindrance.
 

There is something wonderfully tentative about this exhibition, where each piece is about an on going process, an exploration of a philosophy of art making, one which is not bound by rules and conventions.