Hot Foil Hands

I've been printing bookmarks again. These bookmarks are for the Centre for Fine Print (University of West England Bristol)'s Bookmarks VI. I narrowly missed out on contributing to Bookmarks V last year, so I'm getting in early this year! The requirement is to produce an edition of 100 signed and numbered bookmarks which will be distributed internationally through art galleries. I am using it as an opportunity to try a new fount, a new machine and some paper I haven't printed on before.

The paper I'm using is old nautical charts which I picked up in an op shop a few years ago. The charts are fascimiles of mostly nineteenth, some early twentieth century, etchings which were offset printed a few decades ago on gorgeous, heavy, smooth paper. I assume they've been made redundant by GIS and other electronic navigational technology. I chose the charts with the thickest paper to cut up into bookmarks (now, don't get all precious on me about cutting up old charts, they are common as muck in this yachties' town). The charts started out as approaches to harbours in Newfoundland, Cote du Norde, Scotland and New York but now as 19x6cm strips most of the bookmarks are anonymous in isolation.

The fount I'm using is Rockwell, which is a bit of a gothic style type, slightly Old Western (as in cowboys) looking, but relatively fine in its serifs. It's old-fashioned looking, yet quite clean and sharp. Te Kowhai has Rockwell in 3 or 4 sizes, most of which appear to have been hardly used- if the pristine shiny state of the type is anything to go by. I'm using the 24pt which is bold enough to be legible when overprinted on even the busiest slip of chart. The text on the plain white back is in 18pt Rockwell with my favourite ornament, the pointing hand.

The new machine is Jim's hot foil press, which is the tiniest printing press I have ever used. It looks like a cross between a sewing machine and a microscope. We spent hours playing with it on Friday afternoon, trying a dozen types of printing surfaces (paper, vinyl, leather) at different temperatures to see what it could do. What it does best is print a brilliant gold foil with a mirror surface and intricate detail onto glossy smooth surface. In comparison, any matt or textured material takes only a dull and patchy print like unpolished brass. Sadly my beautiful charts are not glossy enough to do the gold foil justice, but happily my clear vinyl bumper stickers work a treat. So today I printed a hundred tiny golden hands onto sticker paper, which I will cut out individually and and stick on the front of the bookmarks, thus satisfying my persistent desire to make things as fiddly and complicated as possible.

Samples of hot foil on different materials.

Gut Feelings

I'm pretty sure the first book I ever made as an edition was Dislocation*. It's an accordion fold with simple pop-up panels for the text, illustrated with line drawings with bit of collaged colour. It was laser printed (I was years away from access to letterpress) and since I had no idea of how to make a decent book cover back then, its the simple folded card cover that makes me cringe when I look at it now. But the content of the book is still as strong as it ever was.

Dislocation is a longish poem about travel and homecoming, in particular it's about jetlag, and the profound effects it can have. I included excerpts from the poem in this post, written almost exactly one year ago. A year ago, six months ago, I was still in my profoundly anti-travel state of mind. I really should know better than to ever say never! With my recent trip to Queensland I have done one of my famous about-face total attitude shifts. My own unpredictability is, as usual, keeping my friends endlessly entertained.

In the first day or two back from my January trip, I wrote this little poem with a very different (to Dislocation's) interpretation of the meaning of my jet lag feelings.

Gut Feeling

I left my juice and my heart behind in the tropics.

Vital fluids trailing my obligations by three hours,

I can see them back there, a languid puddle in the heat

With the sea lapping up warm and salty,

saying belong belong belong

here.

Yes my guts are hardly missing me, this empty shell of self

whithering dry and itchy,

All the moisture in me has been cried out.

I work carelessly, distracted

by my chest aching a hole where my heart should be.

And yet I don’t want to call my heart home.

I want to pack up my shell and return to

my centre, my passion, my guts.

* I still have copies of Dislocation available, discounted to $100 because I don't like the cover. Email me at the address on the right.

The beautiful photographs of Dislocation are by Katrina Ching

New Lumix

Inspired by my pleasurable photographic experiences in the Daintree, I finally, after about a million years of procrastination, bought my very own, very good, digital camera (Panasonic Lumix FZ8). Readers who have tolerated the evils of my cellphone's camera (and worse) will be relieved. Friends and family who have generously loaned their cameras or acted as guest photographers will be even more relieved.




Yesterday was the first day when I had time to really have a proper play with my new toy, studying the manual and experimenting with the controls beyond the point and shoot function. Now of course I feel an overwhelming need for a tripod, but more so an acute awareness of how much there is to learn. But, as usual, I am looking forward to learning. Depth of field here I come...

Unfortunately, the reason I had time to play was because a big storm scuppered my travel plans and I was stuck at home for a long, grey, rainy day. Though I was somewhat limited in subject matter, and variations on natural light beyond overcast, but I made the most of the rain on the window panes.

But I reckon the view of the conservatory through a spray bottle was my best picture of the day.

Rainforest Rain

It is cool and rainy and windy here in Whangarei.
Back in Northern Queensland it is hot wet monsoon.
I left before the Wet Season really started, but I remember the rain in the rainforest:

Beyond the rainforest's edge
the rain falls in a dense veil
heavy and steady.
But on the forest floor
beneath the triple canopy
the rain meanders distractedly earthwards:
dribbling down palm trunks
plopping from leaf to leaf, layer to layer
dissolving into a heady, warm mist
floating between the trees,
with a scent of moist greenness, oxygen rich,
chlorophyll and ozone made tangible.
And a golden green light
flashes off the mirror surfaces of wet leaves.

Creative Composing

Composing is the term letterpress printers use for selecting and placing the moveable type in order to print some text. I like the way it distinguishes that unique activity from the typesetting that is done with a keyboard. I like the pun with composing music. I have posted before about the pleasure I take in the pace and physicality of choosing each lead letter and jigsawing together the white space between the text.

Lately I have been composing with type the way I will use a keyboard or pen and paper to compose new thoughts. I don't know quite what I'm going to say before I start pulling letters from their compartments. Last week I spent a whole afternoon composing and recomposing four phrases that I was making up as I went along. I finally took some proofs (some on paper bags, thanks to E's South Island foraging) to see how it all looked and then got distracted by the quality of the print. Letting the proofs lie scattered on a much used tabletop all week I have come to believe I must start again almost from scratch and change the words, the type size and the layout. This is not a disappointing thing to anticipate and I am looking forward to it with pleasure.

This is, of course, a terribly inefficient way to work, but then I am not terribly interested in efficiency when I am nurturing new inspiration. Efficiency is desirable when one is creating an edition, pursuing a deadline, or trying to make money. But my goal at the moment is coax the tiny sparks of creative thought into flickering flames, to allow the space and time for ideas to become fully themselves without being shaped by market forces. Having attempted that nurturing with keyboard and pen, I am now seeing what emerges when I dip these nascent ideas straight in the founts.

Such luxury! Such indulgence! I feel extraordinarily lucky that I have the freedom for such pleasurable play. There are other projects and circumstances on my horizon which will require efficient composing and printing and I will enjoy working within those constraints when the time comes. But right now I am loitering with delight in a backwater of creative composition.

Travelling Journal Returns Home

To celebrate the long awaited return of my travel journal from its extended sojourn at the Grand Chancellor near Auckland Airport, here are some night-themed snippets from its pages. These words take me back to the sultry heat of my twelve nights in Northern Queensland.

The cicadas rise and fall like breath, like tide,
like a pounding pulse filling my ears with organic white noise.

Dusk falls like mist to the rainforest floor
Night rises up to the canopy like a dark sea dense with life.

We are floating on a warm night sea
an undulating mercury and cobalt membrane.
Overhead, bats flap purposefully, silently
from sleep towards a dark night full of fruit.

Quickly the strange sounds of the rainforest at night
become familiar and I hear the chuckchuckchuck of the gecko,
the cluck and gobble of the Bush Turkey,
the soft hoot of owls,
the rustle of wallabies
as if eavesdropping on the gossip of new neighbours.

The frogs have finally fallen silent after their great night chorus
and the birds take up the aural space.
Cicadas continue unabated
as does the rain in plops, drips, drizzles and distant rushing along a stream bed.
Trees tower in a green cloud
dense, complex, ancient and alive.

A Whangarei Walk

Saturday afternoon I reached a point I sometimes get to in a burst of new thinking when the energy generated is too great to be released simply by writing it down. I have to move my whole body- walking or dancing or cleaning. So I slipped pen and paper into my bag along with the water bottle and set off on foot, first to the Quarry to check out Sue Forward's new exhibition, Arcadia.
This is the same gallery where I had my Domestic Pilgrimage show last year. Look how she has transformed the space into a beautiful woodland in which to show her ceramic garden sculptures. I liked her big centaur and the bell, both partially visible in the right of the photo, but I was most impressed by the arrangements of bark, plants, and vessels of water all evoking an Arcadia inside.

I carried on walking up the track from the Quarry into the bush. My mind still boiling with new ideas I stopped to write them down at a lookout point near the pa site. On the wooden seat there I found this poignant exchange:

I carried on up the hill and had a strange encounter with a very cool tree:
My goal was to visit the Quarry Gardens for the first time, but the signage on the bush tracks is sparse so I took a much more roundabout route than necessary, but it was a pleasant journey and when I did finally reach the Quarry Gardens via the front gate I was stunned at what I saw. I'd heard the subtropical Gardens were a volunteer project only started a few years ago so I was expecting something pretty unsophisticated.

What I found was a work in progress, to be sure, but one fairly well progressed and obviously with professional landscaping design and resources poured into it. Numerous well formed tracks and bridges; varied, lush, unusual plantings; lots of seats and lookouts; waterfalls and a lovely little lake... it was all quite impressive. I wandered about for a while, only encountering one group of visitors, but I didn't see all there was to explore in my acute awareness that I'd already been walking for 2 hours and I still had to find my way back over the hills to home.

Whangarei readers, if you haven't seen the Quarry Gardens yet, or recently, get yourself along! It's a cracker of a public park and a great place to take a picnic (but be warned there are no dogs allowed and no public toilets available). I saw lots of intriguing plants there, but these magnificent leaves really resonated with my current passion for tropical foliage.

Daintree Calling

I have come back from the Daintree with a tantalising sense that, only as I was leaving, did I start to understand a glimmer of what the rainforest has to say to me. I got a hint of what I might learn, but no chance to learn it before I had to come home. I feel a very strong pull to to go back and let the language of the leaves seep more thoroughly into my imagination.

I very much want to express my incipient awareness of the rainforest story (and I've already started playing with colour and form) but I fear that I can't offer much more than a superficial description from afar. Truly, I don't think that I dreamed of the Daintree for 20 years only to dishonour it by making a pretty postcard or a nice souvenir of my short visit.

I still haven't got my travel journal back from the hotel where I left it by the bed (five phone calls later they assure me -again- that it is in the post) so I can't work with the words and images I produced while I was in the rainforest. But before I went over there I was writing this kind of thing in anticipation, and now in retrospect, it is only more true:

Twenty years ago
a flickering glimpse of Bliss
imprinted on my eyelids
the one place I felt I had to go,
in indelible, shadowy, sap green.

At night I dream
of the wise child in a forest
of towering old souls
standing and falling
dying and growing.

Daintree, you reverberate in my imagination
like a choir singing ancient cradle songs in fresh voices.
No other forest can match my desires,
my mouth waters imagining the smell of hot misty life,
I am ready to be tangled in your veins.
I hear you calling me home to Eden
and finally, I'm coming.

Finalist

Almost the last thing I did before catching the plane to Queensland in mid-January was drop off the elaborately packaged New Shroud for King Tutankhamun with Kate. As the Shroud was made specially for the NZ Art Guild Art Awards and the Awards organisers would only accept delivery on three days during which I would be in Australia, I asked Kate, my most reliable friend to courier it on my behalf. On the day of the sending I was out of cellphone range, deep in the Daintree, thinking of the Shroud only as a technique I could develop to capture the amazing quality of light filtered through the triple canopy of the rainforest.

In fact, the next time I thought about the Awards was when I got off the plane from Cairns in Auckland, and switched on my cell phone. A voice mail message was waiting from Sophia, the organiser of the NZ Art Guild Art Awards, telling me that the Shroud had been selected as one of 16 finalists, out of over 200 entries! That exciting news did much to ease the wrench of leaving the rainforest. The voice mail reminded me that the opening/awards ceremony would take place two days later at the Bruce Mason Centre in Takapuna.

So Friday night, with a friend from work, I found myself in Auckland sipping punch and looking at all the different ways that artists had interpreted the challenge terms for the Awards. While I was making the Shroud it was hard for me to imagine any other thing I could have done with 'cool blue', 'circular,' stamp' and 'equality'. My equal blue circles stamped out of watercoloured paper seemed inevitable to me... and then I saw so many other possibilities. My favourite was Sheryl O'Gorman's Cause and Effect, a watery blue abstract with amazing depth and subtle texture- which won third prize.

I'm honoured to have been selected as a finalist in the Awards and am inspired that this recognition comes for a piece so very different from my usual books (insofar as anything much I've done in the past six months could be considered usual). The Shroud was my first real two-dimensional piece and, more importantly, one of my rare works without text. Sometimes I feel a tyranny of expectation that I will always provide poetry. Sometimes I just want to let form speak for itself. Shroud being selected as a finalist was an affirmation that even my wordless work has value for people besides myself.

Labyrinth at Emmegen

A compulsive maker like myself can't go on holiday and just do nothing constructive. That wouldn't be as relaxing or fun as it was to weave creative expression into my vacation.

I was filling my journal prolifically of course: poetry, observations, sketches, doodles of labyrinths and collages of tourist ephemera. Unfortunately in the mad rush from the final hotel room to the airport yesterday morning I left my journal by the bed and so I'm waiting impatiently for it to arrive in the post with its store of words and images.

I also made a Treasure Hunt book which I left as a gift for Santo, filled with little things I wasn't sure would be allowed back into NZ, including a cuttlefish and a beautiful big smooth disc shaped seed found in a fibrous husk on the beach.

Then there was the pistachio shell poem (one letter on each little creamy shell) which I left in situ on a coffee table (the text is also in my journal so I'll update this when I can).

I particularly liked this spontaneous poem written in ochre on river stone in the Emmegen Creek swimming hole. (All this life- And so much joy).


But my most significant, albeit most temporary, work was made later the same day at Emmegen Beach, Cape Tribulation. Emmegen Beach is a perfect crescent of golden sand lying between the rainforest fringe and the Great Barrier Reef (reef visible as the indigo shadows in the turquoise sea in the photo below, rainforest visible as the dappled shadows of coconut palms falling across the labyrinth).
I'm not exactly sure why labyrinths were such a persistent motif for this holiday. I read a book about labyrinths in the week before I left, and I learned how to draw a 'classic 7 layer labyrinth'. My journal is full of pages of various labyrinths in different coloured gel pens, drawn as meditation and experimentation as I allowed the labyrinth to occupy my imagination, without trying to make sense of it. Drawing little labyrinths and tracing them with my finger is all very well, but eventually I found myself wanting to walk one. So when Santo and I were alone on a brochure-perfect tropical beach I picked a smooth shady area to layout a simple 3 layer labyrinth big enough to walk.

Santo provided the frisbee digging tools and much of the hard labour of scooping sand to establish the basic structure. I crawled round and round from the centre outwards making low walls to walk between. It was a lot of work to do on a hot day, even in the evening shade, so I didn't get too fancy or precious about the finishing of it. When it was done enough, Santo headed off for a stroll down the beach and a close encounter with a stingray (shades of Steve Irwin), and I began to walk my labyrinth.

I found it impossible to walk quickly: as soon as I entered the labyrinth my pace slowed, and I found that even the relative simplicity of my labyrinth provided a satisfyingly long and complex journey. A labyrinth like mine leads you near the centre when you first enter, allowing a good look at the goal and the illusion that it will be easily accessible. Then the path spirals out and you find yourself tracing the perimeter, a long detour circling away and around the outside before you return for another glimpse of the centre and finally the spiralling inwards in lazy loops to arrive at last. The walk out again allows the journey to be experienced in a mirror image, leading you ultimately to the an exit beyond which the sea beckons. Between each circuit of the labyrinth I went down to water's edge and let the warm water lap my feet (despite my paranoia about stranding jellyfish attacks).

I can't tell you (yet) what the labyrinth means exactly, I just know it matters that I made one where no one but us and the crabs would walk it, and where it would be wiped away by the tide by morning.


*******
NB Now that I am home and can post photos here, I have updated my earlier Aussie posts with some pictures. Scroll down and have a look.

Bittersweet

Cane Toad

How bittersweet it is on this last day of my holiday. I'm back at Trinity Beach after five days staying north of the Daintree River, exploring Cow Bay and Cape Tribulation. It was a perfectly blissful time, every minute a pleasure: playing on pristine golden beaches, eating exquisite food in beautiful settings, waking up to the green glow of dawn filtered through the triple canopy, lounging around in crystal clear swimming holes shared with brave little fish, discovering all kinds of exotic fruit, falling in love with the foliage, the butterflies, the geckos, the bats, the birds... even the enormous spiders.

This whole Northern Queensland trip has been delightful, every day has been relaxed and warm yet has had its own character. In summary:

Day 1 was the Day of the Fruit Market in Cairns
Day 2 was the Day of the Night Swim and the Fruit Bats over the sea at Yorkey's Knob
Day 3 was the Day of the Frog in the Redlynch Train Station
Day 4 was the Day of the Backyard Ulysses Butterfly
Day 5 was the Day of the Baby Crocodiles on the Daintree River
Day 6 was the Day of the Cane Toads on Trinity Track
Day 7 was the Day of the Brush Turkeys in Mossman Gorge and the Kuku Yalingi Walk
Day 8 was the Day of the Cassowaries* and the Red Legged Wallaby with Papaya at Crocodylus
Day 9 was the Day of the Bandicoot , the Tiny Grey Frogs and the Little Bats
Day 10 was the Day of the Bespectacled Bats in the Orchard and the Little Fish at Emmegen
Day 11 was the Day of the Turquoise Dragonfly and Golden Orb Spiders at Cape Trib
Day 11 was the Day of the Pied Imperial-Pigeon at Trinity

Baby Crocodile (40cm long)

*Cassowaries are big birds, related to the moa and kiwi of New Zealand, with long blue necks, red wattles, aqua eye masks and a fat body covered with fluffy kiwi-like feathers. Afterwards we were told that only 1 in 400 visitors to the Daintree sees a cassowary in the wild. We saw four of them in two days.

Sitting on the front porch of our rain forest cabin one morning, enjoying a fresh papaya and the majestic Strangler Fig dominating the patch of forest before us, we suddenly realised that a giant cassowary, about 2m tall, was stalking deliberately across the forest floor directly in front of the porch railing. I scrambled for the camera but couldn't get a good shot in time and instead kicked myself for being distracted from just enjoying the bird itself. When a wallaby hopped past our cabin a couple of minutes later I didn't make the same mistake and concentrated on imprinting his cute furriness on my memory rather than trying to take a photo.

Back in the same spot for evening drinks we watched the same (or another) cassowary take exactly the same path in the reverse direction-obviously a commuter route! The next morning I was up early, back out on the porch on my own, writing rain forest poetry, when who should come cruising back again, to make another majestic pass for my eyes alone. And finally, as we were clearing out the cabin and loading up the truck, we both enjoyed a final sighting- me through foliage and Santo almost eye to eye with the bird (who can be dangerous, with its big feet, sharp beak and hard high crest).

Golden Orb Spider (See the golden sheen to its web? This spider was bigger than my hand)

Hot Holiday

This post is coming to you from an internet cafe at Trinity Beach, near Cairns, Queensland, Australia. I'm having a holiday, a real, live, purely self-indulgent holiday, my first in years. I'm here in Northern Queensland because I was invited to stay in a tree house in the rainforest, which just happens to dovetail with a dream I've held for 20 years, about staying in a treehouse in the Daintree Rainforest, inspired by the film, Bliss. When offered the chance to follow my Bliss, I didn't hesitate to accept.

I was pretty nervous before I got here about coming in the height of the Wet Season when it is hotter and rainier than any other time, with cyclones too, and when the stinger jellyfish and crocodiles make swimming dangerous. But I find that in reality, I love this climate. The sensual, languid, tropical heat makes me feel very happy and at home. My physiology isn't necessarily as keen on the heat as my soul: I almost got heat stroke in Kuranda after spending too long inside a greenhouse-type butterfly enclosure (but oh, the butterflies here are so abundant, so beautiful). I'm fine in the fresh air though and have discovered that when I am really hot it is more bearable to be moving than sitting still panting like a wallaby in the shade. The rain held off for the first five days of my stay, and now that it has come the air is cool enough that we even turned the fans off last night.

Thanks to stinger nets on many beaches I'm getting lots of swims. The best so far was a calm evening when the sun was setting, the moon was rising, the water was bath warm and as I floated on my back in the undulating, amniotic water hundreds of fruit bats flapped silently overhead, silhouetted against the darkening sky. I like the fruit bats here very much. I was walking past the library in Cairns (an air conditioned oasis in the city) when I looked up into the huge trees to see what was causing the cacophany of squeaking and twittering: hundreds of fruit bats hanging upside down, flapping their big black wings steadily to cool off their golden furred bodies. They were not asleep at midday, but chattering and playing -or fighting, and even flying a little from branch to branch.

Fruit bats on the banks of the Daintree River.

My best animal encounter so far was also totally unexpected. Santo (my treehouse host) and I were waiting in the train station gift shop for the scenic train up to Kuranda and he beckoned me over to see a display of clever paper sculpture animals, specifically a green tree frog which I was admiring when our eyes were caught by a remarkably likelike frog-toy on top of the display stand. We both were thinking, how clever and lifelike this mechanical toy was: its white throat pulsing, and then we realised it wasn't a toy but a real Common Green Tree Frog, somehow inside this gift shop. Crowds of tourists swirled around us as we spent a few long magical minutes with the hand-sized frog, making eye contact and wondering at its presence. Only when I lifted my camera up to take a photo did he leap away, swift and far, to land high on the wall, still unnoticed by anyone but us.

Tomorrow we head North for four or five days in the Daintree. I love the rainforest here, especially to walk very slowly, or sit still for an hour in one spot, and let the detailed diversity of the flora and fauna enter my awareness in a way that is simply not possible on a swift pass no matter how skillfully guided. At speed, from a car or boat, or even a brisk walk, it doesn't seem so different from dense bush at home... But with contemplative awareness I become suffused with its unfamiliarity, taking it into me to become familiar, and already it feels like another home, one that I have imagined for so long and now is where I breathe and feel and listen and see.

Overcoming Inertia

A New Shroud for King Tutankhamun

King Tutankhamun's new shroud is all finished and almost ready to send. The shroud is 120cmx100cm and looks like the sea, like mermaid scales, like armour, like magic. In the end I decided that adding hieroglyphics or the John Donne quote would be superfluous. It is full and complete just as it is. Ironically for a shroud, it is full of life and energy.

I came home from packaging it up for the journey to Auckland and was reading Synchro Destiny by Deepak Chopra. He used an analogy of the sea to explain the soul. Each wave is a unique entity, yet inseparable from the whole of the sea. Oh, I thought, that is like my shroud, each little circle unique: its own subtle shade and pattern, its own curious little face and yet all part of the whole piece, a little wavelet of the ocean.

Summer Do 2008

The Quarry's 'Summer Do', 9 days of parallel workshops in everything from life drawing to earth building opened yesterday with a lovely powhiri. Unfortunately I am not able to participate in any of the workshops, such as Experimental Printmaking or A Capella Singing) as I have to go back to my office job on Monday. But in the meantime I am hanging around trying to be helpful to the organisers and soaking up the life and energy that has suffused our usually-somnolent little piece of paradise.
In the foreground is a birds-eye view of the Quarry on a quieter occasion- at the moment bright yellow marquees and sky blue tarpaulins dot the grounds and the parking lot (the arc of grass) is covered in tents and campervans. The buildings on the lower left are Te Kowhai Print Trust where I do my letterpress. My little Studio 4 is tucked out of sight in the building facing the car park.