Backstories zine

Pictured above: the cover art for Backstories, another mini-zine-in-the making for the upcoming Sticky Institute 2020 Festival of the Photocopier Zine Fair at the Meat Market, 3 Blackwood Street, North Melbourne, 3051. 

We'll be donating all proceeds of Moth Woman Press sales at FOTP 2020 to Wildlife Victoria’s Victorian Bushfire Appeal.

Pictured below: the FOTP 2020 poster, designed by Tim Sta-Ana.

I'll be there on Sunday 9th February from 12–5pm and hope you’ll drop by and say hello. 

For further information, scroll down to our previous post.

Frankenstein's Women: title page and cover art

My dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed — my dearest pleasure when free.

(Mary Shelley’s introduction to Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, 1831).

Pictured above are progress views of the blocks for the title page and cover image of Frankenstein’s Women, a forthcoming artist book focusing on the peripheral female characters in Shelley’s enduringly influential gothic novel. 

The project began last July when I undertook a residency at Melbourne Athenaeum Library as part of Melbourne Rare Book Week 2018.

With the end of the project firmly in sight, I’ve been feeling a little like Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Looking Glass Land as I add text to the lino in mirror writing. (Click on images to enlarge).

A New Leaf

When the infamous countdown to 2016 began, I was hard at work on the cover art for a new mini-zine. It's very much a work in progress, but it seemed so pertinent to the start of a brand new year that I'm sharing it here.

Happy New Year from Moth Woman Press.

 Draft front cover for A New Leaf  

Draft back cover for A New Leaf

As the midnight bells tolled, there was still time to light some sparklers and
toast the arrival of the New Year 

Cover Art

For the second time one of my works has been chosen to grace the cover of an anthology of tales by Lucy Sussex. The cover art is a version of Spellbound, a 2007 oil pastel. Although the drawing is predominately red and black, the author and publisher believed that in this particular context it might misleadingly suggest vampire or horror stories.  Russell B. Farr of Triconderoga Publications was at pains to preserve what he referred to as ‘the striking vibrancy of the original’. The shade they eventually selected is exactly the blue of a series of hair ornament paintings I was making at the same time as Spellbound; they were intended as a counterbalance to the red combs. Consequently it didn’t feel as if the artwork had been too compromised. I certainly appreciated the care they took and their concern that I would happy with the result.

Currently I’m Artist in Residence at the Art Vault in Mildura, so I was unable to attend the Melbourne launch, a double disappointment, as my friend Dmetri Kakmi gave the opening address. So far I've only seen the very low resolution image pictured above. I'm very much looking forward to seeing the finished result, and of course reading Lucy's wonderful stories.

Some Cover Art

Over the years my work has been reproduced on a number of book covers, which I thought I would share with you. Click on images to enlarge.

From top:

A Tour Guide in Utopia by Lucy Sussex, MirrorDanse Editions, 2005

The Greatest Treasure of Charlemagne the King by Nadia Wheatley with illustrations by Deborah Klein, Scholastic Australia Pty. Ltd., 1997

She's Fantastical - the first anthology of Australian women's speculative fiction, magical realism and fantasy, edited by Lucy Sussex, Judith Raphael Buckrich with a foreward by Ursula K Le Guin, Sybylla Feminist Press, 1995

Saint Martha according to Deborah Klein: cover art (page 6 of She's Fantastical)

Forging Identities - bodies, gender and feminist history edited by Jane Long, Jan Gothard and Helen Brash, University of Western Australia Press, 1997