Flashed flowers #6

Ornamental blossom trees outside the front of the Music School ANU.

Paper birds #2: the green screen

work in progress. Using the green screen at ANU. Not sure of the title yet.

This will be a new video that re-tells my first encounter with a Pink Robin in the Styx Valley in Tasmania. I was told at the time that it was a Rose Robin. The misidentification lead me to become a twitcher. The video will have a narrative where I try and think through why the correct identification was important to me.

More letterpress adventures

There are no pictures of me in action this time as I was the only one in the studio Book Studio, due to term break and Caren is having a well deserved research break- part of which was at Otago printing press, Dunedin. So it was just me and The Beast. I was a little nervous so I did venture into the nearby honours studios and ask the conscientious students socialising working to come running is if they heard screams. But I am please to say that I did not fuck up the press or rip the paper drum (I have forgotten it's Proper Name) although I did print red hate and silver love onto it once or twice. It does sound as if it has a new wheeze but I could just be being paranoid.

I was printing up a couple of things- the extra chapzines (which is still in process but fairly straight forward as the chases are already set), and a cover for the new Flaps: Hate Mail #3. With Caren not being there to check my chases I made several mistakes. Not so many on the first plate- which I printed in red- so I could so straight over the orange of the chapzine plate and not have to clean the rollers. But with the second plate- silver- it took a a while to work out how I should set the chase and place it on the bed.

Take one:

Take Two:

There are four changes that you can see. There was more padding to bring short letters up to type high. With photocopying it's so easy to make a change to where you put a page and my mind is so geared to reversing and the paper and printing face down that it was a little weird thinking through how I had to place and set each plate. Caren would have answered all my questions in two seconds before I had placed it on the bed, where there is not enough space to turn the chases without lifting them up and therefore losing loose letters and all the paper padding you have in place.

The original idea was to have the two plates printed over each other as you can see below:

But as you can see it wasn't working. I set both plates with wooden type as they are a lot larger and you can quickly create a solid page of type. However the same scale makes over printing in this style harder read. I was realising then what was working with the two colour plates in the Nature Strip Chapzine. But the biggest and mist painful aspect about making changes when you have the chase in place , is that it takes many hours to set the plate, and a good hour to clean up so you feel very committed to getting something printed- or using the plates that you have. So an emergency decision was made to print the second plate on the back side. Here's the two sides:

It still needed something to make it work and to make it clear what the zine was about and who by. So we stamped the cover with our trusty rubber stamps- used in three Flaps editions now, the other two being Sad Sack Saturday Night and Joe Jobs.

You can buy Flaps and other zines at Sticky in Melbourne and online with Smells like zines and hopefully soon Format.

chapzine

I’m still working on the chap-zine that re-uses the discarded stamped prints from the installation of ‘Varied, noisy’ at Artspace last year. Chapzine is Caren’s term for a zine – like artist book that been produced using letterpress, and is usually printed on one piece of paper and folded (like the orginal chapbooks). The one piece of paper makes the setting up and printing time more manageable.

When you do a search on the term chapzine you mostly get links to Caren’s chapzine pr0n c0k-tales, but I also found references on this dead Art School blog in Vancouver. I gleaned from the detailed entry about Chapbooks on Wiki, that chapbooks where still a common form in the States in the early 1900’s, so not surprising that the term still has resonance there. Although I also found this interesting little poetry press in Berry, NSW, using the term.

The wiki entry also provided the wonderful term ‘bum folder’:

Because of their flimsy nature such ephemera rarely survive as individual items. They were aimed at buyers without formal libraries, and, in an era when paper was expensive, were used for wrapping or baking. Paper has also always had hygienic uses and there are contemporary references to the use of chapbooks as bum fodder

I don’t recommend that you use the Nature Strip chapzine as toilet paper as it is over 120gsm: not very soft or absorbent.

I have now printed two colours on the outside and am getting ready the plate to print on the inside. The top picture gives you an idea of how the long pieces of paper will be folded into a zine.

Here is a detail of the whole image that will be on the inside. It’s a reworking of the drawing that Andrew McQualter and I did on the walls at Artspace.

At the moment as well as working on a deadline for Aichi Triennale, (this website has a very helpful counter telling me it's only 37days to go) I’m also trying to get things ready for a show with Andrew in Melbourne at VCA’s Margaret Lawrence Gallery (when you see this link you have to wonder why Universities, like local councils, can't get the importance of a good website for a gallery). Busy? Too much on my plate? Yes well…

What I have been up to #2

The Metal plates: the chase was only just big enough to reach the length of the paper and print on all four faces of the folded Chapzine, so there was a bit of unconventional clamping going on.

Making the adjustments to the fine furniture. It was absolutely freezing this day- A typical snow day in Canberra- starts at the 'warm' 9 degrees then rapidly decends by 11am to -1 with large heavy grey clouds hanging low. The talk goes round the school where the snow is falling and the next morning the Brinabella's are dusted white.

The prints the stacking up in the holder tray.

Just the second side to do now..and I am running out of time TOTALLY- I leave for Japan in 3 weeks.. EEK!

What I have been up to #1

photos top to bottom: Caren doing some fine tuning of the furniture so it fix printing shadows on the irregular type; wooden type of first plate; dancing with the Graphix cylinder proofing press.

I’ve been pretty busy in the last couple of weeks, finishing the editing of a new part to walking through clear fells, and printing quiet a bit in the Book Studio at ANU. I have set plates in the past but had out sourced the printing. The exciting thing over the last couple of weeks is that I have started driving the beast of the press. Caren uses the driving metaphor quiet a bit but I found for me it was a bit more like dancing- once I had worked out which foot was going to step on the release that grabs the paper and which hand would hold the paper to the drum and press the print button, it all started to flow.

Shots above are from the first layer of translucent fluro orange.

Posting this now and will post second plate and more images and explanation next post- which will hopefully be tomorrow but as Lateline Business is on the TV it means it’s time to go to bed.

On ANU campus