Ampersand Duck too

Back in the good old innocent days of  blogging , I would document a wonderful perk of living in Canberra: hot air balloons (or, as my Western Australian father calls them, “baahllooowens”). They would appear in Autumn, when the air was cool and crisp and the sky usually clear. Either we’d get up early in the morning for the Balloon Festival by the lake, or I’d just see a balloon while I was out and about, and it never failed to lift my spirits, and if I was already feeling happy, I’d just get dreamy happy. The hero image here is a shard of a screenprint I made at a  Megalo  workshop. Balloon days are actually the reason I became Ampersand Duck — Below is a snippet of a letterpress print that I made as a student in the mid-1990s, and the combination of a comma and ampersand was perfect: literate yet completely silly, my favourite way of living life. So, I chose this small town not only because I have roots here and it’s affordable, but also because it’s 20mins from the be...

I’m a member of a few bookbinding guilds, not because I’m a keen binder, but because I do enough bookbinding to be eligible and it’s generally a small community down this end of the world so why not support it. I'm also a book designer, mostly for academics, nothing too sexy.  I was recommended this excellent  Substack article  called ‘Books Going Wrong’ by one of the various newsletters and it made me want to jump into the comments with what I’m about to show you, but you can’t actually – as far as I can tell – include images in Substack comments. For that reason I’ll throw them in here before I go any further. Can you see why I want to share? Bastardising the immortal words of Sesame Street,   NONE OF THESE THINGS IS JUST LIKE THE OTHER. Where do I start? These are meant to be the hardback first editions of the diaries of a serious and well-respected Australian writer. They are trying to hit all the markers of quality: hardback, dustjacket, nice paper, reason...

Living in a reasonably small town is still fascinating to me. I’m terrible with faces and names, but I know that they will stick in my head eventually, so I smile at everyone just in case. I like making my own fun, and don’t get lonely easily, so I’m actually terrible at wanting to find fun, but when there’s easy fun to be had (criteria: walking distance from home), I’ll be there. I bought my house to (a) support and encourage my parents to move off their 20-acre prickle farm and into town, and (b) live in the house myself when they moved out. I couldn’t afford to buy in my city. When my parents lived in my house and I visited, or eventually lived with them until they moved to their new supported-living villa, I would sit on the front porch with my mother and watch the world go by. She’s got dementia, but she loves looking at things, even if she doesn’t know the words for them anymore. She would look upwards and say, ‘look at that…’ and move her hand in a soft swirly motion. I’d say, ‘...

 A while back I decided that ENOUGH was my favourite word. It works on so many levels if you need a mantra to stop buying / eating / ‘treating yourself’ / overworking, etc etc. It also works when you get the shits with The Way Things are Being Run and How Things are Being Done. In 2016, as part of a cluster of artworks for a group exhibition with a political theme, I set letterpress into a series about ENOUGH, and printed them on reflective red vinyl stickers. I put a set on the pole outside the gallery. The shop that sold me the vinyl said that it was hard-wearing, and the stickers did indeed last for years, progressively being peeled off by annoyed staff and punters. The stickers were also very portable. I took a couple of sets overseas with me and stuck them in urban spaces.  I used silver ink to print the ‘enough is enough’ text onto a black tee, and that tee is now worn to rags. Just before COVID19 broke out, I was teaching a Typography unit to budding graphic designers,...

The forme for my broadside  SCUMMO  (2021), which I threw onto a tray when I had to move the equipment out of the Wayzgoose Press studio…   I know it’s a common thing these days, and too casually thrown about, but I am sincerely somewhat ADHD. Every day is a wrestle to attain hyper-focus, otherwise I flit around like one of those microbats in a shed roof, doing a bit of this and a bit of that. I don’t know whether I’ve always been like this (my teachers would no doubt say yes) or if it’s the result of looking at a screen for half of my life. I feel sorry, regularly, for all the young people who have only known screens.  Hyperfocus is my favourite state of being. As a young girl I achieved it via books, and could be found at various hockey fields/ cricket matches/ social functions that I was dragged to by my parents, sitting under a tree or in the back of the car with the windows down, or behind a couch, reading a book for hours.  For the past few...

I wanted to kill my Chimpmail account, because I never used it. It seemed to be just another chore. What to do instead? Everyone kept saying 'Go to Substack' and it really did seem like a new exciting thing that fit the bill. So I went to Substack, told my Chimpmail subscribers (which was the first email I'd sent for ages) to find me there, and then waited a week and killed the Chimpmail account. This is what I put in that first Substack:  I suddenly realised that I invited my Mail Chimps to join me here without anything to offer you. Howdy! I’m hoping to get my blogging head back into play so that participating is more interesting than a mere newsletter subscription :) Here’s an image from my current exhibition with poet Melinda Smith (Corridors of Power,  M16 Artspace in Canberra showing until 26 October). It’s a photo of the MV TAMPA, the ship that rescued asylum seekers from their sunken boat in 2001 and then sat anchored off Christmas Island until the Howard governme...