When Craft ACT puts on its annual member's show, the exhibiting members are asked to contribute in some way: help with bump in or bump out, or give a public talk. This has been an insanely busy year for me, so as much as I enjoy a good old 'patch & paint' session, I put my hand up for a floor-talk. The theme of this year's exhibition is CARE , and we were asked to consider how this relates to our work. I've had no access to a studio for most of this year, so I entered a book that I printed last year for BOOK ART OBJECT, called L OO P . (I did get a chance to print two things this year before the lockdown and subsequent closure of the art school for repairs, but one was a personal work for a retiring friend and the other hasn't been shown in the exhibition it was made for). Here is my talk: Floor talk, Craft ACT, 28 November 2020 I don’t know how you can be any kind of creative maker without a sense of care, and particularly -- unless you’re a purely di
Sometimes I feel like thinking about old work, the work that hasn't made it onto my current website .* So occasionally I'm going to revisit things as a little series I'm calling Own Goal . What follows is from 2009, edited from the original in my first &Duck blog. The Pillowbooks is a two-object artist's book comprising a complementary pair of concertina folds. It was made for my exhibition Pressings: Recycled Bookwork (Megalo Print Studio + Gallery, 2009 ) , and sat so quietly in the show that I don't think many people noticed it. The rationale for this exhibition was that the works in it were made from the remnants of other work; I used altered commercial books alongside pieces created from larger/more formal book projects that I'd worked on over the years. When I produced Transmigration , a fine press book of poems by Nan McDonald with drawings by Jan Brown, I printed the edition on paper called BFK Rives Grey, which is a lovely eucalypt grey-green col