Flower Spike, etching and lithograph, unique state, 2010

The winners for the Waterhouse Natural History Art Prize have been announced! The winner in the Works on Paper category is fellow Tasmanian Kaye Green and it is a well deserved win too! Her beautiful lithographs are a culmination of many years of dedication to this traditional practice and with her recent experience at the Tamarind Institute enabled her to produce works that have been brewing in the artists thoughts.

The overall winner is Flood Stones by Nikki Main from the ACT. It was good to see sculpture take out the top prize! I am very pleased to be a finalist in such a wonderful award with Flower Spike and you can see the fabulous selection of work on paper the finalist page.

The exhibtion of work in the competition is on at the South Australian Museum in the Special Exhibition Gallery for about 7 weeks from mid July.

Some of my prints from the recent MFA exhibition will be on show and for sale at the Brunswick Street Gallery (322 Brunswick Street Fitzroy, Melbourne) from the 26th of February to the 11th of March. Opening night is on the 26th from 6pm. I have posted the prints I chose for the space on my art wesbite news blog.

This is a group exhibition of printmakers selected by the gallery. Other exhibitors in the show are Tessa McDonnell, Nanette Hoysted, Lindsey Matthews, Jessi Wong, Elizabeth Barnett, David Nixon, Cleo Wilkinson and Alex Gillies.

Kaye Green is an accomplished lithographer and following a recent residency at the Tamarind Institute she will be have an exhibition at the Long Gallery in Salamanca Arts Centre. Opening at 6pm on the 25th of February by Dr Rod Ewins, the show will feature lithographs and monotypes. The exhibition runs until the 9th of March.

There is an excellent interview with Kaye Green on the Art Re-Source website.

I have been dabbling in the craft of website building again for a friend at university. It is such an interesting process – especially when you use a hand code method and need to negotiate the scope of the project keeping in mind that this is an interest rather than a business!

Bert Aperloo has been terrific to work with – fast to deliver the content I ask for and happy to alter things according to design and time restraints. He is a multi talented man and his work truly reflects who he is which is a fabulous quality in this day and age of over emphasising mediocrity through repetition of thematics. His work has a lot of strong and unique qualities.

Bert Aperloo is having an exhibition at the Top Gallery in Salamanca Arts Centre during November, so if your in the area it will be a good show of work that will form part of his Master of Fine Art.

Osmosis 2009 closed its doors today after a two week exhibition of works that responded to the landscape and culture of Bruny Island. This was a sort of intermission for me between completing my MFA and moving into life after university.

And so to the prints above!

Over the last few months I have been included in an exchange with students from the Warringah Printmakers in Sydney. The wonderful interactive qualities of the inetrnet have enabled me to meet Rosanna and we have enjoyed an ongoing email contact. So this is where we come back to the prints above.

The exchange has been themed by the seasons, and above are my four prints, summer, autumn, winter and spring, each 12 x 12cm. I didn’t plan the four prints as a set, so they may look a bit like someone has had a split personality problem? Anyway, the last print is an etching that I did while I was doing one of my gallery sitting sessions for the Osmosis exhibition, and is probably the first real print post university that has no purpose other than to exist because I felt like it.

A strange feeling really, and more questions than answers.

Iona is a current PHD Candidate at the University of Tasmania. She is having an exhibition of work that she is developing for her submission early next year. This is a great opportunity to see what has culminated from years of expanding technical skills and honing in on the thematic content of her thesis.

The exhibition is on at the Inflight Gallery in North Hobart, hidden behind the Kaos Cafe. The opening night is tonight at 6pm an the show continues until the 25th of September.

Iona creates her prints using etching, lino cut and relief prints with mysterious processes! Together they form intriguing and interesting work that you want to look at more than once to glean more information each time.

So the results from the on site experiment are very encouraging  I think. I immersed the paper, bound with silk and interleaved with bits and pieces I found on the beach or ground, into a tannin rich pool. The tannin is coming from the bracken fern which is common in the area and can be seen in the foreground of the above photo. The pool has had a lot of water running through it, but it is only flowing with lots of rain and will dry up to nothing.

The paper bundle was then steamed and simmered for about 45 minutes before soaking until it was cold in the solution of simmered eucalyptus leaves. The markings on the paper are quite beautiful on some of the pieces of paper these are already printed I think – what more could I add? I love the smell of the paper too, but the process has hardened it a bit, so it will be interesting to see how well the ink takes to the surface. So next is the printing, and I’m still considering about the best approach. Minimal I think… resulting in a book…..

This looks a bit strange but there is a reason behind the madness! For a start the paper size I am using (40 x 80 cm) is a lot bigger than anything I can immerse the paper into to steam or simmer. So I rolled up the paper with eucalyptus leaves and stood the rolls on top of the immersed leaves and simmered it for about 45 minutes. I turned the paper around at the base, so that the staining would vary on the bottom of the paper as it steamed.

Then I put the paper into a bucket and covered it with the hot brew. I turned it a few times so that the paper was covered quite well, but I left it only for one night. You can see the bottom of the paper has a much stronger colour than the rest, which is where it was resting in the simmering water. I’m sure that it would have been a lot more stained if I had been more patient!

You can see the eucalyptus stain on the paper in the fan area where I masked it from the other etching plate. It has the aged look I was hoping for and is really quite exciting to work with. More to come I believe! Actually I’m off to Bruny Island again for a couple of days and I intend to immerse some paper in the tannin rich creek which should act as a mordant and increase the colour results of the dye process – perhaps!

The tannin rich water that has been flowing onto the beach over the last couple of months is such a beautiful translucent tone – just love it! It looked like silk in the afternoon glow.

I kept the curtain open in my room so that the morning light would force me out of bed to catch the sunrise! It was well worth it as the colours glowed a warmth and grace that left a calm feeling with me all day.

The first light struck the white of the waves as it lifted above the sand dunes and highlighted the rocky cliff faces on the other side of Cloudy Bay.

The morning sun was also fabulous for picking up the edges of the patterns left by the water running off the sandy beach. Delightful dancing forms!

But eventually it was down to work! I like ot use tools from the environment that I am working in, and in this case the screw shell made an excellent scratchy tool. They are a foreign species to Tasmania, coming from New Zealand, but they are super efficient at breeding and it is a sad sight when you see a beach covered with these invading shells. It suited my project to use a screw shell to mark the plate that subtly refers to the colonising of Australia.

The Osmosis journey is on again this year. We have expanded our number of exhibitors to a healthy dozen and we have an exhibition scheduled for September at the Sidespace gallery in the Salamanca Arts Centre.

First step is to take the journey to the location we have chosen, which is Bruny Island this year. Several ladies have already ventured across the short but deep stretch of water that lies between the Tasmanian shore and the Bruny coastline. The ferry leaves from Kettering and tomorrow I will be on it to join a group of 5 for a weekend of making art.

This year we have people working in a number of media – painting, photography, printmaking and sculpture, so the final exhibition will be an exciting event as we gather together the work for the first time. We have built a website which is at the ‘bare bones’ stage but the news page is a blog which will have entries of progress as we work towards the September 8 deadline.

So I’m off to put together a boiled fruit cake  and all the arty supplies I might need for the weekend, and of course the camera! Hopefully it won’t rain the whole time and I will have some half decent photos to share here when I get back.