With Marguerite Brown, Manager, Print Council of Australia |
Yesterday evening, after a terrific opening address by Marguerite Brown, Manager of the Print Council of Australia, followed by a few words from me, LEAVES OF ABSENCE was launched at the Melbourne Athenaeum Library. Thanks to Marguerite, the library's Business Manager Sue Westwood, librarian Tom Coleman and all who came along to toast the launch of the book, it was a truly memorable night.
Marguerite has kindly offered to send me a copy of her speech, which I will most certainly be posting in the near future. In the meantime, below is my own effort, followed by selected pictorial highlights of the launch.
LEAVES OF ABSENCE is a very different
kind of book. For one thing, it’s an artist book, limited to an edition of only
10. For another, its narrative is purely visual. Like some of the best-known
fairy tales, however, it started with a journey into the woods – in the
Victorian goldfields town of Newstead in June 2015, to be more precise.
On that occasion my partner Shane Jones
and I were visiting two dear friends, Leigh Hobbs and Dmetri Kakmi, who were
staying there in a little cottage - also the stuff of fairy tales. After lunch,
they suggested a walk. Perhaps it wasn’t quite the equivalent of that long ago
boat trip on the Isis River in Oxford that the Reverend Charles Dodgson (better
known as Lewis Carroll) and his friend took with Alice Liddell and her sisters,
but it feels like that to me, because on that day, although I didn’t know it at
the time, LEAVES OF ABSENCE was born, and with it an entirely new direction in
my work.
Some months later, I made my first
foray into digital prints in Not Born Digital, a Goldfields Printmakers
portfolio that explored the historic connection of the Victorian Goldfields
with China during the gold rushes. The portfolio was presented at IMPACT 9, the
international printmaking conference at Hangzhou, China in September
2015.
Initially I declined the invitation to
participate. Aside from having no prior background in or knowledge of digital
printmaking, I’m primarily interested in reclaiming women’s histories, and this
was a period from which Chinese women were conspicuously absent. In 1861
Chinese immigrants made up 3.3 per cent of the Australian population. The vast
majority (38,337) were men, compared to only eleven women.
For the men, separation from their
families was a source of abiding sadness. Their unjust treatment is well
documented, but almost nothing is known about the women who remained in
China.
In Newstead alone, there were over 3000
Chinese miners. The Eucalyptus leaves in LEAVES OF ABSENCE were sourced there
because of their significance to the project but also because of their singular
shapes - in part the result of interventions by my 'insect collaborators', the
Eucalyptus tip bugs. So invaluable was their contribution, they rate a special
mention on the book’s colophon page.
In my work, silhouettes are principally
metaphors for marginalization or invisibility. The most recent examples, some
of which are on display here tonight, are hand-painted onto pressed Eucalyptus
leaves that were plucked from saplings in Newstead. These are the raw material
for the archival pigment prints, AKA Phemographs, in LEAVES OF ABSENCE.
The enchanting fairy tale films of
German born silhouette animation pioneer Lotte Reiniger (1889-1981) are a key
influence on all my work with silhouettes. Influences entirely specific to this
project include early photography and silent film. Contrary to popular belief,
not all of the first moving images were in black and white. In many cases, a
series of coloured filters were applied, usually to indicate mood, while other
directors, including one of the masters of early film, Georges Melies, employed
artists, usually teams of women, to painstakingly hand colour his films frame
by frame.
The seemingly obvious links to the Chinese
traditions of paper cuts and shadow puppetry in LEAVES OF ABSENCE were, at
least at first, a case of serendipity. My initial research included a study of
historic Chinese women’s hairstyles. Reduced to shadow forms, however, the
women could equally be from any place or time, including the present.
After that first visit to Newstead, I
was to venture into the woods many more times, both literally and figuratively,
and, much like a character from a fairy tale, I sometimes lost my way. Despite
straying from the path on several occasions, however, I never met any truly big
bad wolves. In fact, I encountered some wonderful people, as well a team of
creative insects, who helped me on my way.
'A fairy tale ending' is popular term
for a happy ending - although many of those ancient tales were very dark and
ended badly. Not so this story. A number of the people from the journey that
started in Newstead are here tonight and I'm grateful to the Melbourne
Athenaeum Library for giving me this opportunity to say thank you - beginning
with Leigh, Dmetri and my partner, Shane, who have been there from the very
beginning.
Margeurite Brown, thank you so much for
that fantastic opening address. Thanks also to Cathy Leahy, for your words of
encouragement when the project was very much in its fledgling stages and to my dear
friends Gracia Haby and Louise Jennison for your sage advice, support and
friendship. Thank you to artist Sophia Szilagyi for introducing me to master
printer Luke Ingram, who printed the images in LEAVES OF ABSENCE and taught me such a lot besides. Without Luke, I very much doubt if this work would have come to
fruition. Thank you, Tim Gresham for technical aid. Thanks to Jimmy Tang at Whiteslaw
Bindery. Keith Lawrence and Tim Bateson from Tacit Contemporary Art have also
been enormously supportive – thanks, guys. (A substantial
amount of the work I made after completing the book will be shown at Tacit from Wednesday, 29 November - Sunday 17 December). Thank you to the Melbourne Athenaeum
Library for having us. Huge thanks to Business Manager Sue Westwood for initiating
the acquisition of LEAVES OF ABSENCE and for inviting me to be the Melbourne
Athenaeum Library artist-in-residence during Melbourne Rare Book Week in 2018.
And finally - before this starts to
sound like one of those interminable Oscars speeches - thank you all very much
indeed for coming tonight.
Hand painted eucalyptus leaves, the raw material for the images in LEAVES OF ABSENCE |
LEAVES OF ABSENCE with selected page views |
With Shane Jones |
Introductory remarks by Sue Westwood |
Marguerite Brown delivers her opening address |
...followed by my own response |