Festschrift: a Celebration in Print

Festschrift A Celebration in Print

Image credit (cover): Patsy Payne, Under my skin, 2019, ed. of 28, linoblock printed on Gampi, 28 x 25.3 cm.

FESTSCHRIFT: A CELEBRATION IN PRINT

Antonia Aitken

James Langer

Surya Bajracharya

Heidi Lefebvre

Georgia Black

Pete McLean

Richard Blackwell

Rose Montebello

Penelope Cain

Sarina Noordhuis-Fairfax

Shellaine Godbold

Patsy Payne

Lizzie Hall

John Pratt

John Hart

Erica Seccombe

Nicci Haynes

Bernie Slater

Stephanie Hicks

Kate Smith

Clare Jackson

Rebecca Stapledon

Rachel Jessie Rae

Rose Townsend

Julian Laffan Project led by Dr Erica Seccombe, Lecturer (Foundation Studies) & Convener Postgraduate Coursework Studies, School of Art & Design, Australian National University (ANU).

This portfolio has been created in the spirit of a Festschrift and contains 25 works collated as a print portfolio edition that celebrates the artist Patsy Payne in her role as Head of the ANU School of Art & Design Printmedia and Drawing Workshop from 1998 – 2013.

In academia, a Festschrift is a book celebrating a respected academic. The term, borrowed from German, is often translated as a publication that contains original contributions by the so-honoured academic’s close colleagues and including their former students. A Festschrift can be anything from a slim volume to a work in several volumes. It often includes important contributions to scholarship or science.

Patsy taught hundreds of students who continue to practice as artists today, and are employed in the arts sector as teachers, academics, directors, curators and managers. As an insightful educator and artist, Patsy guided and influenced her students in many ways and continues to be both a mentor and friend. Rather than essays, these prints will reflect the diversity of approaches to print and celebrate the generations of artists who have been taught by Patsy. As a collection of new work, the portfolio demonstrates a wide range of approaches to print with a focus on a small selection of her former students.

The portfolio also includes a contribution from Patsy, and John Pratt, her former colleague of many years. This portfolio highlights the strength and breadth of the School of Art & Design’s Alumni community created through its undergraduate and postgraduate programs. It also serves as an important record for future generations, celebrating the achievements of a well-respected academic and a leader in the field of printmaking and drawing.

Patsy Payne retired from her position in 2013, but she continues to work as an Emeritus Professor in the Printmedia & Drawing workshop. She exhibits regularly nationally and internationally, and her work is held in public collections including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Australia, the Australian National Library and the Frans Masereel Centre Archive, Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp. Patsy studied archaeology at Sydney University before completing a Visual Arts degree at Sydney College of the Arts and later a Bachelor of Science at ANU.

Image credit: Erica Seccombe, Tribute, 2019, ed. of 28, photogravure, 28 x 25.3 cm.

ARTIST STATEMENTS

ANTONIA AITKEN I was taught by Patsy between 2003 - 2006 at the ANU. Patsy played an important role in supporting me to enter into teaching, recognising my keen interest in sharing knowledge and facilitating groups of people.

She gave me my fist sessional lecturing job in 2009 in the Printmedia and Drawing Workshop. This formative experience led to a growing interest in art education and in 2018 I was awarded a Teaching Merit Award for student engagement at the University of Tasmania.

I am currently based in Tasmania where I am lecturing in Printmaking and Drawing at the University of Tasmania’s School for Creative Arts and Media (CAM). My artwork has been shown nationally and internationally and was most recently exhibited as part of Performing Drawing at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2018). My work is held in significant print and artist book collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Library of Congress WA, USA and Library for Artist’s Book, Sydney. I have been awarded a number of national and international residency opportunities including the inaugural CAPO Reading Room Residency, London (2011), Black Church Print Studio, Dublin (2011) and Womens Studio Workshop, NY, USA (2012). My art and research practice engages walking, printmaking and drawing and investigates how these methodologies can inform sensitive and ethical attachments to place.

My recently completed PhD explored my developing relationship with lutruwita (Tasmania) and examined how complex histories and settler colonial legacies shape and inform personal entanglements with where we walk.

SURYA BAJRACHARA Working across monotype, screenprinting and lithography, printmaker Surya Bajracharya makes work that oscillates between place, politics and personal experience. Recent bodies of works have included intimate and reflective landscapes to dynamic screenprinted posters making social commentary through found imagery. He graduated with a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) majoring in Printmedia and Drawing from the the ANU School of Art & Design in 2004, and has since been involved in a wide range of group exhibitions. Recent solo exhibitions include Oceans Apart, Oceans Between at Canberra Contemporary Art Space and Passenger at Megalo Print Studio + Gallery. Bajracharya has been frequently shortlisted for prizes around the country and this year he is a finalist in Megalo International Print Prize 2019.

Image credit (this page): Surya Bajrachara, Untitled, 2019, ed. of 28, lithograph, 25.5 x 56 cm.

Image credit (left): Antonia Aitken, Untitled (holdfast iterations) (detail), 2019, ed. of 3, woodblock and handcut stenciling, 28 x 25.3 cm

GEORGIA BLACK Georgia Black is a visual artist currently based in Melbourne. Graduating from Printmedia and Drawing at the ANU School of Art & Design in 2014, she was taught by Patsy Payne from 2010 – 2013.

Georgia is currently interning as a studio hand and glaze research assistant at the School of Clay and Art, and is pursuing ceramics, printmaking and site-specific installation in her practice. This year she will be travelling to Central America for an Artist-in-residence program in Armila, Panama, with La Wayaka Current.

Image credit: Georgia Black, Eddy (detail), 2018, Ed of 28, linocut, 28 x 25.3 cm.

Image credit: Richard Blackwell, Cairo 1, 2019, unique state edition of 28, relief print, 28 x 25.3 cm.

RICHARD BLACKWELL I was a student of Patsy Payne from 2004 – 2008. I can’t thank her enough for all the time she has spent listening to my questions and advising me since then.This print documents 28 combinations of the same number of pentagonal tiles tessellating across the plane. To fill the plane, 4 pentagons combine to make a hexagonal shape forming a pattern colloquially named after its application in the cobbled streets of Cairo. Whilst the number of possible combinations of tiles is astronomically high, the specific qualities of this pentagon restrict the possibilities of the resulting image, conforming the lines and surfaces to the logic of an isometric projection. It is this tension between chaos and design that - as much as the occasional arachidonic visual moment - reminds me of life in the city and of the unpredictable complexity of our individual experience.

Richard Blackwell is an artist currently based in Sydney. After studying under Patsy Payne at the ANU School of Art & Design, he continued to complete a Masters in Studio at the School of the Art institute of Chicago. He has shown widely, most recently at the 2018 Istanbul Design Biennale, and his most recent exhibition with Kate Conlon at Mana Contemporary in Chicago, USA.

PENELOPE CAIN Landscape in its widest terms is central to Penelope Cain’s practice. She engages with landscapes of the Anthropocene: landscapes marked by humans- occupied, extracted and transformed land, bearing the manifest residues and remains of our physical and economic presence.

Penelope Cain has a Bachelor of Visual Arts (2001, ANU School of Art & Design), majoring in Printmedia and Drawing where she was taught by Patsy Payne to expand beyond traditional printmedia. She has a Master Fine Arts (2016, University of Sydney) and a previous research science background. She was a finalist in the Sulman Prize (2016), awarded a Glenfiddich Award Residency, Scotland (2019) and most recently awarded the Fauvette Loureiro MemorialArtists Travel Scholarship (2019) and will be mapping, through walking and conversation, the post-colonial, anthropogenic landscape of a rapidly shrinking glaciated ice mass in the Peruvian Andes.

Image credit: Penelope Cain, Respiration (Sounds of Gondwana), 2019, ed. of 28, digital print on rag, 28 x 25.3 cm.

SHELLAINE GODBOLD Shellaine Godbold studied in Printmedia & Drawing from 2006 - 2009.

Shellaine is an Australian visual artist based in Canberra whose primary practice focuses on using drawing as a means of making sense of her world.

The works that she creates are informed by her experiences in unfamiliar landscapes and cultures, underpinned by a devotion to the drawing process in its varied forms.

Image credit: Shellaine Godbold Mountain for Patsy (detail), 2019, ed. of 28, linocut, 28 x 25.3 cm.

Image credit: Lizzie Hall, Home!, 2018, ed. of 30, linocut, 25.3 x 28 cm.

LIZZIE HALL Lizzie Hall studied under Patsy at the ANU School of Art & Design from 1997 to 2000. She graduated from the Printmedia and Drawing Workshop in 2000, and has exhibited throughout Australia including as part of the Hobart Art Prize, the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship, the Konica Minolta Redlands Art prize, the Mosman Art Prize and the Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize. Hall’s work is politically motivated and materially based.

JOHN HART I graduated from the ANU School of Art Printmedia and Drawing Workshop in 2010.

Patsy was head of workshop through most of my time at the ANU, and she - along with fellow PM&D staff John Pratt, Peter Jordan, and Alison Alder - had a profound impact on my practice.

Patsy taught me a lot about printmaking, but more importantly she confirmed for me the value of a career as an artist, encouraged my interest in community building, and convinced me that it is possible to use an arts practice as a force for good in the world - to create positive and meaningful change.

With this is in mind I have continued to develop my practice, and have worked in the arts community at the Press Manager at Megalo Print Studio and, I am currently the Woden Community Arts Officer.

Image credit: John Hart 22UF Electrolitic Capacitor (detail), 2018 lithograph, 28 x 25.3cm.

NICCI HAYNES Nicci studied in the Printmedia and Drawing Workshop from the ANU School of Art & Design from 2003 to 2007. For Haynes, print is one part of a practice that includes drawing, artists’ books, madscientist constructions and awkward little videos with language and communication difficulty as a recurring theme. She is currently a Technical Officer in the Printmedia and Drawing Workshop.

Image credit: Nicci Haynes, I don’t know what you mean, 2018, intaglio, 28 x 25.3 cm.

STEPHANIE HICKS Melbourne-based artist Stephanie Hicks works with drawing, artist’ books, textiles and primarily, collage. Her practice is informed by traditions of printmaking, craft and decorative arts, and a love of picture books and storytelling. The collection and arrangement of photographic images is central to Stephanie’s creative practice. Disparate fragments are brought into new relationships with one another to create a visual dialogue, or poetry.

Stephanie studied under Patsy Payne at the ANU School of Art from 2001 - 2004. She was awarded the NECG Honours Scholarship in 2003 and achieved first class Honours the following year. On graduation, Stephanie undertook a studio residency with Canberra Contemporary Art Space. Recent projects include: Craft Cubed Artist in Residence, Craft Victoria; Not a love, not a jewel, not a single line, Bundoora Homestead Art Centre; and CUT, The Dirty Dozen, Melbourne.

Stephanie has been shortlisted for the Wyndham Art Prize, the Banyule Works on Paper Award, the City of Hobart Art Prize and the Swan Hill Print and Drawing Acquisitive Award. Her work is held in private collections including The Peter Fay Collection and the Henry Ergas Private Collection.

Image credit (right): Stephanie Hicks, Selected Poems: One, 2019, collage, 28 x 25.3 cm.

CLARE JACKSON

Image credit: Clare Jackson, Operation Crossroads: Test Baker as seen from Bikini Atoll, 2019, ed. of 28, intaglio, 28 x 25.3 cm.

Clare Jackson is a Canberra based visual artist working across mediums including printmaking, drawing and ceramics. Jackson’s practice is intrinsically linked to her interest in time, memory and the traces they leave on our surroundings. Each unfolding moment in time is a unique experience that imparts itself on us, while simultaneously resisting any attempt to grasp it. While there is continuity to these elements, they are also ever changing.

In 2013, Jackson grauduted with a Bachelor of Visual Art (First Class Honours) from the ANU School of Art & Design. In her final year, she participated in the Indonesia Research Trip lead by Patsy Payne and John Pratt.

Image credit: Rachel Jessie-Rae O’Connor, Good as Girl, 2019, screenprint, 28 x 25.3 cm.

RACHEL JESSIE-RAE O’CONNOR Rachel Jessie-Rae O’Connor graduated from the ANU School of Art & Design, Printmedia and Drawing Department in 2002, with Honours and a University Medal. Patsy was Department Head over that time with a focus on nurturing printed, drawn, sculptural and installation approaches. After graduating, she undertook residencies at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space and Megalo Print Studio + Gallery before moving back to Melbourne where she began studio practice and established a long involvement with the City of Melbourne’s Art Play and Signal Youth Art Centres, creating large scale artworks as community projects. These projects have included the creation of a hand drawn 1:2 scale dinosaur skeleton with over 600 school children, hand-drawn mural projects in regional Victoria, and a range of workshops and runway shows exploring recycled clothing and fashion as a comment on consumer culture, including presenting works for the arts program of the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival since 2016. Jessie-Rae completed a Master of Teaching (Secondary) at the University of Melbourne in 2018, and currently teaches art and design to senior secondary students at the Northern College of Art and Technology in Melbourne. She has maintained an exhibiting and interdisciplinary studio practice alongside community projects and teaching, and has exhibited in ARI’s around Australia and national institutions including the National Gallery of Victoria and Perth Institure of Contemporary Arts. Her practice currently explores costume, glitter painting, digital design and curatorship for her at home-bedroom gallery ‘babespace’. She has been awarded numerous prizes including a Canberra Contemporary Art Space Members Show Award (2015) and an ACT Chief Ministers Department Staff Award (2010) for her work in public art on the Woden Flood Memorial. Her artwork is held by CMAG and in private collections in Australia and New Zealand.

JULIAN LAFFAN Julian Laffan studied at the ANU School of Art & Design in the Printmedia and Drawing Workshop from 2000 to 2004.

Laffan is an artist who specialises in hand coloured woodcuts and drawings as hand rendered meditations on a moment. He is also an educator, illustrator, curator and lives and works in Braidwood New South Wales. Laffan is an Honours graduate of the ANU School of Art & Design and continues to exhibit locally, nationally and internationally.

Laffan is represented by Beaver Galleries, Canberra.

Image credit: Julian Laffan, Newtown Evening, 2018, Ed. of 28, hand coloured woodcut on iwaki paper, 28 x 25.3 cm.

JAMES LANGER James (Jimmy) Langer is an Australian artist working with a mixture of print-making techniques, digital software and drawing to produce a range of abstractions and collages that serve as a map of personal experience and perspective. An interest in writing and science also inform his work, and a general enjoyment of the absurd and ridiculous.

Langer graduated from the ANU School of Art & Design in 2008, majoring in Printmedia and Drawing.

He has exhibited in Canberra and Melbourne and finished a Master of Fine Arts at the Victorian College of Arts in 2016.

Image credit: James Langer, Untitled, 2018, ed. of 4, screen print, 28 25.3 cm.

HEIDI LEFEBVRE Heidi Lefebvre completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) in Printmedia and Drawing at the ANU School of Art & Design from 1999 to 2002, and was awarded the university medal. Now based in Canberra, she lived for several years in regional NSW and learnt the value of art promoting wellbeing in regional communities. Through screen printing, drawing and costume making, Lefebvre’s practice explores themes of performance and artist as historian. Her textile works and costumes investigate the potential for activating a drawing. The cross referencing of imagery, process and material creates an intensity where the experience of making the work is acknowledged at the same moment as artist is placed in the position of performer. Reworking materials invests Lefebvre’s final displays with simultaneous histories: the history of the materials and the making of the object as well as an awareness of the historical context of the explored themes and the artist who made them. The Courage Chronicles was made possible through the generosity of Megalo Print Studio + Gallery Artist in Residence Program 2018.

Image credit: Heidi Leferbvre, Courage Chronicals, 2019, ed. of 3, collage, 28 x 25.3cm.

PETE MCLEAN Peter McLean is an artist with a deep affinity for nature and the environment.

He first studied biology and ecology and worked in science and conservation, and later studied Printmedia and Drawing at the ANU School of Art & Design (2006-2009). Working across a range of printmaking techniques as well as drawing and installation, his work explores the materiality of nature, and our physical, emotional, and spiritual relationships with place.

Image credit: Pete McLean, High Country Storm (detail), 2018, ed. of 28, relief engraving, 28 x 25.3 cm.

Image credit: Rose Montebello, Untitled, 2019, ed. of 3, handcut collage, digital print, paper, 28 x 25.cm.

ROSE MONTEBELLO I was fortunate enough to be taught by Patsy for my undergraduate degree. I am grateful for the time, energy and clarity that she offered during my years of study.

Rose Montebello is a Canberra based artist who completed a Bachelor of Arts (Visual) with Honours in Printmedia and Drawing in 2000. Her practice examines the potential to alter the meaning and value of found imagery. Using reproduction, dissection and reconstruction, she creates intricately cut collages that examine human experience, temporality and transcendence.

She has exhibited widely including Streetwise: contemporary print culture, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2015), Wildthing: Animals in Contemporary Australian Art, Mosman Art Gallery, Sydney (2016) and Aviary (2017) and Imitation of life: Memory and Mimicry in Canberra region art (2011), Canberra Museum and Gallery. Her works are held in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Museum and Gallery and Artbank collections as well as local and interstate private collections.

SARINA NOORDHUIS-FAIRFAX Sarina Noordhuis-Fairfax is a Sydney-born, Canberra-based artist and writer. She graduated from the National Art School in Sydney in 2002, before moving to Canberra to study with Patsy Payne and John Pratt. Under their guidance she completed Bachelor of Visual Arts (First Class Honours) at the ANU School of Art & Design in 2004. She obtained her PhD from the same institution in 2018, again with Patsy and John’s encouragement as key members of her supervisory panel. She has worked as Curator, Australian Prints and Drawings at the National Gallery of Australia since 2008.

Patsy Payne is one of those remarkable teachers that you dream of encountering, and I am forever grateful that she was Head of Printmedia and Drawing Workshop at ANU when I arrived from Sydney in 2004. Her generous faith in my abilities, technical wizardry, and that uncanny way of seeing through to the heart of the matter at hand has been an immense support as I have worked to establish my own practice. Despite her own busy life, Patsy continued to regularly meet with me about my postgraduate research even after retiring from ANU and I know my studio practice has been rigorously strengthened by the many conversations we have shared. I feel very lucky to have been taken under her wing ever since my Honours year and can clearly see her lasting influence in my life and career to this day.

Image credit: Sarina Noordhuis-Fairfax, Sea Urchins, 2010, ed. of 3, woodcut reprinted at Viridian Press 2019, 25.3 x 28 cm.

Image credit: Patsy Payne, Under my skin (detail), 2019, ed. of 28, linoblock printed on Gampi, 28 x 25.3 cm.

PATSY PAYNE The shape of the creature is the pressure of life against the limit of death.

- Tom Lubbock, Until further notice, I am alive, (2012, p. 9).

Image credit: John Pratt, Shoreline, 2019, ed. of 28. relief print, 28 x 25.3 cm.

JOHN PRATT Working with Patsy over the course of nearly 20 years was a remarkable privilege. As both artist and educator she established a culture of passionate creative and intellectual inquiry within the Printmedia and Drawing Workshop and as a lecturer she challenged each cohort of students with questions which addressed their role and aspirations as contemporary artists. Accompanying this rigor was an ethos of intense and playful experimentation and research – it was a context which was designed to extend both our curiosity and our sense of ‘possibility’ and it enabled successive generations of students to forge a creative practice which expressed and articulated their understanding of the world around them.

John Pratt is represented by Beaver Galleries, Canberra.

ERICA SECCOMBE I was taught by Patsy Payne throughout my undergraduate degree at Sydney College of the Arts (1988 -1990), and then a few years later during a Graduate Diploma (1995-1996). I moved to Canberra to be supervised by Pasty for my Master of Philosophy at the ANU School of Art and Design (2000-2003). Patsy has had a long and significant influence on my creative life, and she inspired me to be passionate about the things that interest me. Patsy enabled me to pursue a career in the visual arts, and as an academic, and this has always motivated me to do the same for others. As a very young person alone in Sydney, she welcomed me into her home, and I was privileged to ‘grow up’ under the watchful eye of Pasty and Kevin.

Now I am a visual artist based in the Canberra region. My practice spans from traditional and photographic printmedia and drawing to experimental digital platforms using frontier scientific visualisation software. I have a PhD in Photography and Digital Art. I am currently a lecturer in Foundation Studies at the ANU School of Art & Design, and teach for The Centre for Art History and Art Theory, and Convene the Graduate Studies Coursework for Visual Arts, Design and Art History and Curatorship.

The work Tribute was made possible by an artsACT grant to learn the photopolymer gravure technique at Baldessin Press + Studio.

Image credit: Erica Seccombe, Tribute, 2019, ed. of 28, photogravure, 28 x 25.3 cm.

BERNIE SLATER I was taught by Patsy Payne from 2000-2003 whilst completing my Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) in Printmedia and Drawing at the ANU School of Art & Design.

My work focuses on political and social issues. A lot of my work involves defacing surfaces such as magazines, advertising and packaging through drawing and printmaking.

I grew up in Canberra’s punk scene of the 90’s, where I developed an appreciation for cheeky mischief, self publishing and Do-It-Yourself culture. I’ve exhibited widely in many locations across Australia, and have been featured in art journals such as Art Monthly Australia, Artlink, Imprint and Australian Art Collector.

I currently teach Visual Arts at Canberra Institute of Technology, as well as working on my independent art practice and other creative side projects such as the Canberra Zine Emporium and my folk/punk band, Click Cult.

Image credit: Pete McLean, High Country Storm, 2018, ed. of 28, relief engraving, 28 x 25.3 cm.

KATE SMITH My love of nature started young. I grew up in the Blue Mountains, surrounded by national park. My grandparents lived on a farm, and both my parents worked as ecologists. Which all added up to lots of camping trips and time spent outdoors. It was probably inevitable that nature would become the central focus of my art.

I completed a Bachelor of Visual Art at the University of South Australia, where I received a University Merit Award and on graduation my work was selected for the Port Jackson Press Graduate Printmaking Award, James Makin Gallery, Melbourne. Later I studied at the Australian National University where I obtained First Class Honours.

Image credit: Kate Smith, Party print for Patsy (detail), 2018, ed. of 30, linocut, 25.3 x 28 cm.

REBECCA STAPLEDON I was enrolled in the Drawing and Printmaking Department from 2009 to 2012 at the ANU School of Art & Design. I cannot thank and praise the lecturers enough for their enthusiasm and commitment to teaching and for their influence on my practice.

Patsy in particular has a great passion for teaching and would go the extra mile to provide valuable feedback to her students and to share her knowledge and skills. During my time at ANU Patsy encouraged me to be highly experimental with my drawings and prints. I was interested in making process-based drawings and prints through layering using a variety of materials and processes.

Patsy gave me confidence and supported me to carefully observe what was working and what was not and to use this as a way of developing my own personal visual language to create a foundation for this instinctual approach. The method of making acquired during my studies has continued to sustain my practice and I have exhibited continuously in both solo and group shows since graduating with First Class Honours in 2012.

Image credit: Rebecca Stapledon, In Response to Alzheimers (detail), 2019, ed. of 26, intaglio, 28 x 25.3 cm.

ROSE TOWNSEND Rose Townsend studied Printmedia and Drawing with Patsy Payne at the ANU School of Art & Design from 2012 to 2015. Rose’s work practice is focused mostly in etching and mono-print. Her work explores the human condition and strongly reflects the emotional connection to her own personal experiences which involve loss and regeneration of life. Rose is based in Canberra with a studio at Lake Wapengo on the south coast.

Image credit: Rose Townsend, Matriach (detail), 2018, ed. of 3, intaglio, 28 x 25.3 cm.

Image credit (back page): Rachel Jessie-Rae O’Connor, Good as Girl (detail), 2019, screenprint, 28 x 25.3 cm.

School of Art & Design Gallery College of Arts and Social Sciences Australian National University http://soad.cass.anu.edu.au