That’s a wrap on Clunes Booktown Festival 2023

What a pleasure it was to participate in yesterday afternoon’s panel discussion Not Just a Pretty Picture on the final day of Clunes Booktown Festival 2023.

Huge thanks to everyone who made it so: inestimable Festival organisers Jon Hawkes and Sue Beal, fellow panelists Simon Perry and Philip Faulks, our superb Chair, Michele Ely, Shelley Hinton, who curated the pop-up exhibition, A picture’s worth a thousand words and last, but by no means least, our attentive, encouraging and enthusiastic audience. It did our hearts good to see so many of you there.

Pictured second from top, L-R: Chair Michele Ely, panelists Simon Perry, myself and Philip Faulks. Photo credit: Shane Jones.

Pictured above: Shane Jones in the Esmond Gallery, Clunes, with my linocuts The Heavens Declare 1 & 2, 2022 and Pirate Jenny and Mack the Knife and Pirate Jenny in a Kimono, both 1987, part of the exhibition A picture’s worth a thousand words. 

Clunes Booktown Festival 2023

On Sunday 26 March I’ll be joining fellow visual artists Simon Perry, Philip Faulks & Darcy McConnell (ENOKi) at Clunes Booktown 2023 for Not just a pretty picture, an informal panel discussion chaired by Michelle Ely. We look forward to seeing you there. 

Pictured top: Double page view from There was once… The collected fairy tales published by Deborah Klein, Moth Woman Press, 2009. 

For further information, scroll down to Blog Post Wednesday, February 22.

📖Not just a pretty picture
🗓Sunday 26 March, 1.00pm
📍Esmond Gallery, Clunes 
🎫For tickets, go HERE.

Moth Woman Press at Clunes Booktown 2023

Moth Woman Press is eagerly anticipating taking part in the renowned Clunes Booktown Festival on Sunday 26 March. For full details, including where to find us, read on…

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Not just a pretty picture...*

Four internationally recognised artists - Simon Perry, Philip Faulks, Deborah Klein & Darcy McConnell (ENOKi) - talk about how their concerns infiltrate their works, be they sculpture, paintings, woodcut prints, or designing an art tram. Aesthetics aside, there's purpose and deep deliberation in these works. Chaired by Michelle Ely. 

Simon Perry is a Scottish sculptor and academic, based in Melbourne. Best known for his large-scale public art works for urban spaces in Australia and overseas, including Melbourne's Public Purse and Public Address sculptures. His practice incorporates numerous sculptural techniques including casting, carving and fabrication. 

Philip Faulks has been an exhibiting painter, drawer and sculptor since 1981. He has mounted 15 solo exhibitions in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and China and been included in more than 75 group exhibitions in Australia, Singapore, Vietnam and Italy. He has taught visual art within at tertiary level since 1991. 

Deborah Klein has held regular solo exhibitions since 1987 and participated in group exhibitions in Australia and internationally. In 2009 she founded Moth Woman Press, through which she publishes her artist books and zines. Her work has received numerous awards and is represented in public and university collections throughout Australia. 

Darcy McConnell (ENOKi) is a Yorta Yorta/Dja Dja Wurrung man who created one of the 2022 RISING First Peoples Melbourne Art Trams, My Aunty Once Told Me, running on Routes 58 & 59. He contributed to Solid Lines (2022), an RMIT sponsored report on fostering First Nations involvement in the design and commercial art industries.

📖Not just a pretty picture
🗓Sunday 26 March, 1.00pm
📍Esmond Gallery, Clunes 
🎫https://tickets.clunesbooktown.com.au/Events/Not-just-a-pretty-picture or go HERE.

Full details of Clunes Booktown 2023 events are HERE.

📷 Chelepteryx collesi Moth Mask, 2007, Acrylic on canvas, 25 x 20 cm by Deborah Klein 

*Information courtesy Clunes Booktown 2023

Biblio Artist Books at Clunes Booktown

After an eventful month in London (more about that in later posts) we returned to Australia just in time for Clunes Booktown on the weekend of 3 & 4 May. As reported in our last post, Moth Woman Press were proud to be invited to participate in Booktown’s inaugural Biblio-Artist Books, which was curated by Nicholas Jones. Fellow Biblio artists were David Frazer, Angela Cavalieri, An Kyunghee, Gracia Haby, Louise Jennison, Deanna Hitti, Tai Smith, Dianne Longley and Nicholas Jones. The State Library of Victoria and Melbourne University’s Baillieu Library also had impressive displays.

There was no time to acknowledge the inevitable jetlag or the nasty dose of flu that accompanied me back to the Antipodes. Over an incredibly hectic but exhilarating weekend we had hundreds of visitors, many of them new to artist books. There was much positive response to our own work and to Biblio in general.

Click on images to enlarge.

Tired but happy at the end of Day 1

Moth Woman Press artist books and zines

Birthday drinks for Des Cowley. From left: Des, Angela Cavalieri, Robert
Heather, Shane Jones, Steven Kafkarisos, David Frazer and Dianne Longley

Just before the crowds arrived. In the background: Biblio artist Tai Smith,
Susan Millard of the Baillieu Library, the State Library of Victoria's
Robert Heather and Des Cowley and Biblio artist Louise Jennison

From left: Louise Jennison, Sara Gubby,  Gracia Haby, Dianne Longley,
Shane Jones and David Frazer

Angela Cavalieri and Gracia Haby

We even got a mention in the Ballarat Courier. To read the article, Art speaks louder than words by Kara Irving, click HERE. 

Photograph courtesy the Courier

For more about Biblio, visit my Art Blog.

Sneak Peek: New zines for Clunes Booktown

As we announced in our previous post, Moth Woman Press has been invited to exhibit our books at the renowned Clunes Booktown on 3-4 May. We will join a group of distinguished book artists including Gracia and Louise, Nicholas Jones, Angela Cavalieri and David Frazer. It’s the first time that a section of Booktown will be devoted entirely to artist books.

MWP will chiefly be exhibiting a selection of one-of-a-kind books from the Tall Tales series. But we also wanted to take the opportunity to make some new zines especially for Booktown.

Awhile back I began some experiments with folded zines using iPad apps for the layout and design. They never came to fruition, partly because other projects intervened. These unresolved tests became the basis for the new work.

I began with a grid constructed on Strip Designer. Images of my artwork, variously altered in the Etchings, Face on Coins, Pic Collage and Phoster apps, were downloaded into the grid. The zines were laser printed, then cut and folded.

The four zines I've made using this new method are: The Shadow Women, Parts 1-3 and Republic of Mothstralia - Coins of the Realm, featuring the infamous Moth Woman Vigilantes.

Pictured above:

Top, from left: Shadowomen 3, Shadow Women 2 and The Shadow Women, 2014, zines, laser printed, 10.5 x 7.5 cm (closed). Edition: 100

Bottom: Republic of Mothstralia - Coins of the Realm, 2014, zine, laser printed, 10.5 x 7.5 cm (closed). Edition: 100

More Tall Tales to tell

A selection of Tall Tales, unique concertina books, 2013,
ink and acrylic on Khadi paper, 80 x 15 cm (open)

It's been an eventful few weeks at Moth Woman Press, Recently we were invited to participate in Biblio, the inaugural artist books section of Clunes Booktown, which will take place over the weekend of 3-4 May. Biblio is curated by book artist Nicholas Jones and its special advisor is Robert Heather. I've been preparing well in advance, as I'm shortly heading off for a month in London and will return only days before the event. (More about Booktown in my next post).

Meanwhile, an article by Scott Rothstein that predominantly focuses on the Tall Tales artist books, a selection of which I'll be showing at Booktown, has just been published in the online arts journal Hand/Eye. You can read the article, In Silhouette - Deborah Klein's diverse and eclectic paper art, HERE.