Australian Print Workshop 2010–2011 Collie Print Trust Printmaking Fellow
Lisa Roet
The mark of no human hand
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Finger of suspicion Hard-ground etching and lithograph. Drawn on the plate by the Artist and printed in an edition of 15 by APW Printer Simon White at Australian Print Workshop, Melbourne, 2011 Image size: 60 x 45 cm Paper size: 76 x 56 cm
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Australian Print Workshop is delighted to present this wonderful collection of limited edition prints by Lisa Roet, recipient of the APW 2010-2011 Collie Print Trust Printmaking Fellowship. Australian Print Workshop is committed to encouraging and supporting artists to further develop their knowledge and technical skills in the fine art medium of printmaking. With the generous support of The Collie Print Trust, APW offers a number of important printmaking scholarships and awards. APW’s scholarship program is unique in Australia and over the years, has supported more than eighty artists and has resulted in the creation of many wonderful works in the print medium. The prestigious Australian Print Workshop Collie Print Trust Printmaking Fellowship is awarded annually to a leading contemporary Australian artist. The Fellowship provides an extraordinary opportunity for the recipient to undertake a major printmaking project at APW. Working in collaboration with APW’s highly skilled printers Fellowship recipients are assisted to develop a significant new body of work in the print medium.
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1 Shadow of a clew I
Deep indentations… Hard-ground etching and lithograph. Drawn on the plate by the Artist and printed in an edition of 15 by APW Printer Simon White at Australian Print Workshop, Melbourne, 2011 Image size: 60 x 45 cm Paper size: 76 x 56 cm
2 Shadow of a clew II 3 Shadow of a clew III
Hard-ground etching. Drawn on the plate by the Artist and printed in an edition of 15 by APW Printer Simon White at Australian Print Workshop, Melbourne, 2011 Image size: 40 x 30 cm Paper size: 56 x 38 cm
The Australian Print Workshop Collie Print Trust Printmaking Fellowship facilitates a rare opportunity for an established artist, to explore the print medium in depth. For Lisa Roet, who is widely recognised for her sculptural works and large-scale drawings, the Fellowship allowed her to reconnect with printmaking and provided her with the opportunity and encouragement to work on her first major printmaking project. Working in collaboration with APW Printers Martin King and Simon White, the Fellowship enabled Lisa to create an ambitious new body of work in a medium that was unfamiliar territory. Lisa’s Fellowship project was an overwhelming success and resulted in a fabulous suite of ten fine art limited edition etchings. Anne Virgo Director, Australian Print Workshop
Edgar Allan Poe’s short story ‘The murders in the Rue Morgue’, first published in 1841, is the inspiration for a new suite of prints by Lisa Roet. The hero of the tale, the eccentric C. Auguste Dupin, uses his superior powers of deduction to solve a macabre double murder. What manner of criminal, Dupin asks, could brutally strangle and dismember his victims, leaving no trace of his entry or exit from a fourth story room? Surely the killer must combine ‘an agility astounding, a strength superhuman, a ferocity brutal, a butchery without motive, a grotesquerie in horror absolutely alien from humanity’. The crime, he concludes, was not the work of a madman but an Ourang-Outang, escaped from the keeping of a sailor.
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Poe’s description of the ape as a figure of horror interests Roet more than the tale of detection that he unfolds. For Poe ghoulishly dwells on the motif which she has explored so diligently in her art: the intriguing yet terrifying kinship between man and ape. But another kinship emerges in Poe’s story, to be echoed in Roet’s prints. Dupin sketches bruises onto a sheet of paper, then grips it to show that no human hand could match the impressions. Roet bruises and scratches the etching plate, so as to embed into the surface of the prints the traces of the ape’s frenzied assault. The purpose of Poe’s tale was to expound his theory that the analytical tendency represented truly imaginative thinking, rather than mere ingenuity. In uniting forensic clues and an imagining of the hand of the criminal in her prints, Roet exhibits a quality that Poe attributes to his detective, an ‘eager delight’ in the exercise of her ‘peculiar analytic ability’. Dr Chris McAuliffe Director, The Ian Potter Museum of Art The University of Melbourne
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above 1 The beast of Cuvier I 2 The beast of Cuvier II 3 The beast of Cuvier III
Hard-ground etching. Drawn on the plate by the Artist and printed in an edition of 15 by APW Printer Simon White at Australian Print Workshop, Melbourne, 2011 Image size: 40 x 30 cm Paper size: 56 x 38 cm
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The mark of no human hand II Hard-ground etching. Drawn on the plate by the Artist and printed in an edition of 10 by APW Senior Printer Martin King at Australian Print Workshop, Melbourne, 2011 Image size: 120 x 90 cm Paper size: 136 x 101.5 cm
cover Image The mark of no human hand I Hard-ground etching. Drawn on the plate by the Artist and printed in an edition of 10 by APW Senior Printer Martin King at Australian Print Workshop, Melbourne, 2011 Image size: 120 x 90 cm Paper size: 136 x 101.5 cm
210 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy, Victoria 3065 Telephone 03 9419 5466 auspw@bigpond.com www.australianprintworkshop.com Gallery hours: Tuesday to Saturday 10am–5pm 12
lisa Roet is represented by Karen Woodbury gallery, Melbourne
Australian Print Workshop gratefully acknowledges the generous support of The Collie Print Trust which is managed by ANZ Trustees and the Victorian Government through Arts Victoria.
Allan Mitelman Australian Print Workshop Collie Print Trust Printmaking Fellow