Reading Spaces (room brochure)

READING SPACES artist books poetry poetics

Caren Florance Collaborative materiality with Angela Gardner Melinda Smith Owen Bullock Sarah Rice and others

� − �� April ���� East Space, Commonwealth Space, ACT

READING SPACES, SHARED PLACES

swipe, shane strange detail ,

2015 . photo : cf

Reading Spaces is transforming endings into beginnings. Each of these works represents sustained creative time spent as a designer, artist and reader with poets and their words.

There are moments when each role is clearly separated, and others where the lines are blurred. Once we have finished materially playing with the works, they close down into end-products that now need readers to take them outwards again.

Artist books are often displayed as art­ objects: isolated on plinths, or coffined behind glass, a selected double-spread laid out in one static tableau. The reader becomes viewer, and the qualities particular to the book as a medium – the transition from 2D ( page) to 3D (object) through 4D (time) – is lost. Reading Spaces wants to re-establish the intimacy of reader and book, to allow a natural engagement with turning and reading pages. Each book is a space that holds a folding of time and place: I was here/we were here – and now, so are you.

There are many different books laid out, representing various levels of formality that are reflected by their particular reading spaces. They have threads of common­­al­ ity, such as engaging with the past and the future of the material book. Old and new

pro­duc­­tion methods are used, like hand-set letterpress, typewriters, photocopiers, digital printing and screen animation. Most of these are labour-intensive and time-hungry, and were superceded by more commercially viable options, but even work using ‘time-saving’ devices such as computers demands hours of invisible labour. The time it has taken had to be the time that it took.

With the hand-made work, the marks of pro­duction have been foregrounded: if a piece of paper has moved through a press multi­ple times, incidental marks have not been hidden: a deliberate action in the face of the ubiquitous perfection of contemporary print production. Ideas have been affected by the affordances of each process; for example, the print-on-demand poetry chapbooks had technical issues that shaped the outcome of the respective page designs. Re-photocopying a zine to add new ideas leads to an interesting visual disintegration that adds another new idea, and so it goes.

Writers, specifically poets, have been a vital component of this project. I have long been trying to explore ways of working with poetry as a printmaker and designer. The earliest book on display, Shared Rooms, dates

from 2002, and the most recent one was sent back to me by the poet only weeks before the exhibition. Each of the poetry works use active participation by the poets themselves, or they have given permission to use their work actively, which includes displacing their words from their carefully composed and constructed forms.

Two of the projects, Working Papers and Be Spoken To, took a core idea and actively moved it through, around and back via iteration, experimentation and story­telling.

Another project, Tracer, started with a simple piece of transparent paper, and grew to hold and interact with the transparency of projected film. Looking through one of Sarah Rice’s writing notebooks provoked a work that tracked one of her poems from its very first thought to a resolved outcome.

My solo works do not directly use poetry but are engaged instead with the poetics of process and materiality. They ask their own questions of the reader, questions that may actually have no answer, at least not in the foreseeable future.

— Caren Florance April ����

CF + MELINDA SMITH

ms : cf detail from be spoken to, bespoken to

(2014-17) (below).

2014 (above) and 1962:

Melinda and I wanted to work on a project together that tapped into her poetic interests, which include drawing human stories out of historical docu­ments, particularly institu­ tional records like Hansard. She also uses wordplay processes such as acrostics, puns and anagrams, and we both like exploring the freedoms of creative constraint.

We successfully applied to a callout by Craft ACT and the Museum of Australian Democracy for artists to respond to the Old Parliament House permanent collection, and were grant­ed the Sign Room, full of handpainted wood­en signs outlining directives to visitors and politi­cians alike. We turned the sign texts into a group of responding signs that stood in dialogue with the originals for a whole year (Be Spoken To, ����–��).

Composing this work generated a lot of extra material, and together we built up a formal, large-scale artist book that celebrates a year in the life of Old Parliament House: 1962: Be Spoken To (����–��). Using letterpress and screenprint, the book is structured archi­ tecturally and temporally, moving month by month through the social and political history of the building and country. There are over 50 poems through the book, all hand-set and hand-inked; the labour involved limited the number of copies, so we also produced a

more access­ible chapbook in partnership with Recent Work Press, Members Only (����). Not everything can be translated across; there are elements of 1962 that can only be experienced by handling the pages.

CF + ANGELA GARDNER Angela and I both enjoy the serendipity of making textual mistakes. To commence this project, I invited her to play a game with me, where we would text each other lines of her poems and accept any autocorrection that our respective phones offered. This became the Interference chapzine (����).

Working Papers (����–��) is a natural pro­ gression from this, where we gave ourselves full permission to stop making sense. I wanted to fully engage with glitch, discovery and dis­rupted page-space. Angela was keen because her own working process as poet and artist uses disruption, disorder and erasure as a creative methodology.

My pitch to her was this: come to my studio and set some metal type by hand (with no rules), and then I would print them play­fully and send her the results for response. She set me seven short ‘key texts’, composed un­­mindfully, in the manner of automatic writing. She picked up letters without looking, and if she dropped them,

above : ms : cf details from

1962 : be spoken to, 2014–17

sometimes put them back in the stick upside down. They are like a snapshot of that week in my studio, with her composing mind, our wandering conversa­tions and ambient distractions like the radio.

I puzzled over her words in Hone, and then let loose with Torrent, printing them over and over again, mixing them up, spacing them out, turning them over. Interesting readings emerged with every pass of the press. The letters, cast in metal, wore down over time with the constant use, and are now trashed.

I sent the pages to Angela, and she sent them back animated by drawings and marks. She also sent me the poem that had been brewing in her mind as she set the letters, and while a completely separate work, it gains a new augmented reading when combined with the visuality of our letter play in our chapbook, The Future, Un-Imagine (����).

We have another work in the show: Pleasure Demolition (����). This is a further iteration of a work made with street artist Byrd in ����, where we used Angela’s poem ‘Demolition’ in a week-end long print/spray installation. This time I added another poem from her series ‘Notes to Architects’, ‘Pleasure Grounds’, printing the two poems back to back in chunks. Now her musings on pleasure, excess and destruction turn and tease out new readings without need of touch or screen.

CF + OWEN BULLOCK + LC Owen and I are PhD colleagues; we share a love of page space. We attended a conference to­gether in 2014 and he composed a long poem from the snatches of talks and conversation that grabbed at him. With his permission, I printed an edited arrangement on a fold of trans­lucent paper, called Redex (����). The show-through of its text as the paper is turned in the hand generated interesting readings, and Owen rewrote a couple of new versions of the poem in reaction to the experience, which are docu­mented in our chapbook, Tracer (����).

In ���� Owen and I teamed up with artist Louise Curham to produce a collabora­ tive evening per­form­ance in the CMAG courtyard for the You Are Here festival. I printed large paper backdrops for the super8 projections of Louise’s hand-worked films, and Owen performed a collection of his haiku in response to the visual and audial elements of the evening’s installation. The subsequent unique artist book Tracer: You are here (����–��) is no substitute for being there, but it is as much a souvenir of the experience as the other hand-printed books in the show are of their particular collaborations: the printed pages are pieces of a torn-down backdrop, all the poems are present as a script, sorted into groups under the titles of Louise’s films and

above : ag : cf details from working papers,

2015–17 2016. photo : cf

below: ag : cf detail from pleasure demolition ,

printed by ‘domestic letterpress’, or rubber stamps. There are shards of super8 film sewn onto the pages, and the rustle of the paperstock pairs up with the printed TATATATATAT to evoke the distinctive sound of the projectors.

CF + SAR AH RICE

ob : cf redex , tracer , tracer : you are here,

2014–17

Vitreous Syneresis (I see you sometimes) (����) is an exercise in material bibliography, undertaken early in my project. I traced one of Sarah’s poems from its earliest scrawled idea on a notebook page, through its various changes until it made a jump into computer space.

Before she typed them up, every word that pleased her pro­g ressed from hesitant scribble to confident scribing; after that, it’s hard to tell if there are changes because they were not saved within the file. So I brought all the textual move­ment back together via the computer. The poem is about traces, the absence of presence, and the retinal persistence of words. This work made Sarah conscious of her own writing process, which then informed later writings.

OTHER

swipe, philip gross page spread,

2015 . photo : cf

Shared Rooms (����) This is a book of translated poems. There are four versions of four poems by Russian Anna

Akhmatova: the original, a literal translation

by Natalie Staples, and two ‘imitations’ by Australian poets David Campbell and Rose­ mary Dobson. I found the manuscripts at Rosemary’s house in a drawer, and learned about the project, which took place at the ANU through the ����s. I made a drawer to hold the poems. You can lay them out and read them in any order that you like.

Touch to Activate (����) Letterpress production is sometimes a strange, meditative space.

Swipe (����– ) I have been giving this photocopied zine to poets and artists for responses. Some react to each page spread individually, others consider the book as a total experience. It’s not over yet.

Proseity Poems (����) A print-on-demand book. The original prints are offset ink on brown paper. The series of paired images are conversing poems, asking the reader to look and listen.

Touch 00100000 (����) An interactive book. You are invited to pick holes in it.

Various Poetry Design Outputs Pulse, Seam, Elements, JarsKeysPegsGapsNets. (above): sr :cf detail from vitreous syneresis (i see you sometimes) 2014 . photo : cf (right): cf shared rooms, 2002

Formal thanks go to the University of Canberra Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, the Bundanon Trust, the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, the ANU School of Art & Design, Craft ACT, the Museum of Australian Democracy, Recent Work Press, and the You Are Here Festival crew.

Photo credits: Brenton McGeachie, unless other­w ise stated.

Venue: many thanks to the National Capital Authority, plus Neil Hobbs for the tip, Katy Mutton for the flow-through, and the amazing Emma Beer for the install help.

Lighting generously supplied by Integral Lighting, Fyshwick.

Furniture: dining set and ex-NLA table are my own; Fred Ward pieces via Juliet Ward; the rest is borrowed from Canberra Furniture Market, Fyshwick, with thanks to Nava.

Personal thanks: Angela, Melinda, Owen, Sarah, Jen, Jen, Marian, Brad, Rowan, my family (nuclear, extended and chosen), and my lovely friends, far and near.

Supported by the University of Canberra Faculty of Arts & Design and the Federal Government of Australia.

Proudly participating in You Are Here 2017 http://youareherecanberra.com.au/event/ sounding-working-papers/ www.canberra.edu.au/cccr/readingspaces www.ampersandduck.com

Caren Florance is a Canberra-based artist who makes print- and book-related work, often under the imprint of Ampersand Duck.

She has degrees in English Literature and Visual Arts. She teaches book arts and typography and is a freelance designer. She is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Arts & Design, University of Canberra.

Her work is collected nationally and internationally.

Angela Gardner’s first poetry collection Parts of Speech (UQP, ����) won the Thomas Shapcott Arts Queensland Poetry Prize. She has received an Australia Council Residency, a Churchill Fellowship and a Visual Arts & Crafts Strateg y grant. Her most recent poetry collections are The Told World (selected poetry) Shearsman Books, UK and Thing&Unthing, Vagabond Press, Sydney, both ����. She is a visual artist with work in national and international collections and edits at www.foame.org.

Melinda Smith won the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award for her fourth book of poems, Drag down to unlock or place an emergency call (����) and her latest book is Goodbye, Cruel (����, both Pitt St Poetry). Her work has been widely anthologised both inside and outside Australia and has been translated into languages including Indonesian and Italian. She is based in the ACT and is currently poetry editor of The Canberra Times.

Owen Bullock has published two previous collections of haiku, wild camomile (Post Pressed, Australia, ����) and breakfast with epiphanies (Oceanbooks, NZ, ����). He has published a collection of poetry, sometimes the sky isn’t big enough (Steele Roberts, NZ, ����) and a number of chapbooks of haiku and poetry.

Sarah Rice is an art-theory lecturer, visual artist and writer. She straddles the theory/practice divide by drawing on both her PhD in philosophy and her graduate diploma in visual art. She writes art catalogue essays, gives poetry readings, runs ekphrastic poetry workshops, and writes poetry in collaboration with other visual artists.