Printmaking
Artists either love printmaking or hate it. As a medium, it is a group of techniques characterised by making your image on a substrate – e.g. wood, metal, a silk screen, lino or stone – and using ink to transfer that image onto paper. It requires patience, technical knowledge, specialised equipment and time.
Printmaking is like this because its history lies in industry and the transfer of knowledge. Every ‘classic’ printmaking technique was originally used to spread information as widely as possible, whether via image or word. Printmaking was the original internet! Explorers travelled with artists who created images of the lands they visited, sent them back to engravers who transferred them to wood or metal. The images were then mass printed as pamphlets for people to discard or collect. Etchings (metal), silk screens, woodblocks or engravings, lithographs (stone) – their original purpose was to disseminate information. Their creation was always an art, and so eventually they too passed into the realm of art.
I fell for printmaking in my final year of school. I went to school with the daughters of the great Australian artist Fred Williams. When he sadly passed away too young, his widow donated his beautiful printmaking press to our school. I was taught etching using Fred Williams’ press! I was hooked. After school I got a BA in English and Zoology, but kept doing short printmaking courses until I finally committed and did another BA, a decade later, in printmaking at RMIT. In my degree my preferred medium was copper etching, but these days I mainly make linocuts as the technique is simpler, requires less equipment, and has more consistent results.
Influences
The artists John Wolseley, Hertha Kluge-Pott and India Flint have all been major influences..
British-born John Wolseley is one of Australia’s greatest living artists. My mother introduced me to his work when I was young and she was doing a BA through Deakin University as a mature-aged student. John Wolseley co-wrote one of her Visual Art textbooks. His work is that of an artist-naturalist. After fires he will go through the bush with paper to rub against the charcoaled trunks of trees to capture their impressions – literally. He has released sheets of paper to the wind in certain places, and returned weeks, months or years later to retrieve them and see what marks nature has wrought on them. His energy to capture his environment on paper, to learn from it, be in it and to observe and record it in both the broadest and most detailed ways has always inspired me, and I never tire of marvelling at his work. He melds the eye of the artist and scientist in the most luminous way.
Hertha is a legendary printmaker who came to Australia from Germany in 1958. Her work is also very influenced by the Australian environment whose wildness and openness caught her attention soon after she immigrated. I was lucky enough to have her briefly as a tutor at RMIT, and her passion for printmaking as a medium and her integrity as an artist was memorable. Like Wolseley, Hertha is based in Victoria. Her work has a fierce energy.
Lastly, India Flint is another acclaimed Australian artist who does not work in a traditional medium. She is a pioneer of the art of eco-printing/eco-dying. This is when you bundle fabric or paper (Flint mostly works with fabric) with natural vegetation and steam, simmer or boil the bundles in order to coax colour and impression from the plant material to the fabric or paper. She has especially honed her ability to coax colour from eucalypt leaves and produces amazing designs patterned with the deep reds that they produce. In my most recent work I have printed linocuts over eco-printed paper. So these linocuts, of birds and other animals, are printed over eco-prints made from plant material gathered from the animals’ environment.
Why shorebirds?
In 2009 my family and I returned home to Melbourne after three years in London. Our return was spurred by my father’s death; my mother needed me at home. We all had trouble reconnecting with our old lives. My parents migrated to Australia in 1966, the year I was born. My father came to join the RAAF having flown as a navigator for the RAF during and after WW2. Without my father, it was suddenly clear that it was not so much Australia that was Mum’s home, as my father himself. Without him to anchor her, her heartland reverted to England.
I began to use migratory shorebirds in my work for my first solo show in 2010, in particular the Bar-tailed Godwit. These birds travel annually from Australia, where they avoid the harsh northern winter, to Siberia, where they breed. Ever restless, they never settle – neither destination is their true home. Our brief period overseas, coupled with my bereaved mother’s stories, gave me an insight into the tragic and hopeful world of migration and resettlement. The birds provided the perfect metaphor.
As well as embodying this deep sadness, shorebirds also carry the hope of overcoming amazing odds as they travel annually across the globe, traversing seas and continents. These tiny birds can fly for eight days straight without stopping to rest or eat; they can navigate an entire ocean without any landmarks; they can fly in their lifetime further than from the earth to the moon, and they link the 23 countries of the East Asian Australasian Flyway with their journeys.
Since my first shorebird and migration inspired solo exhibition in 2010, I have continued to work with migratory shorebirds as my major theme. I am driven both by them – they fascinate me and I find them endlessly beautiful – and for them, as they are our least known and most endangered group of birds. My interest is aided by the fact that I worked for six years in the 1990s for BirdLife Australia as a scientific editor, so have access to the Australian network of shorebird scientists and experts, many of whom I either had met or knew of from working at BirdLife. Like most passionate experts, they are more than happy to share their knowledge.
Group Projects
Through my art I try to engage people with migratory shorebirds. I have a dream that, like whales, one day they will enter the lexicon of our general knowledge. And, like whales, this will ultimately prevent their extinction. Migratory shorebirds fly in their lifetime further from the earth to the moon! And some of then weigh only 28 grams – no more than a box of matches! People need to know about them! So since 2013 I have created three group art projects about migratory shorebirds: The Flyway Print Exchange; From a Home to a Home: a Story of Migration; and my ongoing project, The Overwintering Project: Mapping Sanctuary.
“The Flyway Print Exchange” involved 20 artists from nine Flyway countries who I invited to make an original print inspired by the idea of the Flyway – the route the birds fly annually from Australia to their arctic breeding grounds and back. Because prints are reproducible, each artist made what is called an edition of 30 prints (so the same image printed 30 times, each identical). Each artist received a set of the prints with sets left over to sell and exhibit. Also, one of each print was posted up the Flyway and back from artist to artist, returning to me in Melbourne worn and torn, addressed and stamped. This set, the ‘Travelled’ prints, is exhibited alongside the pristine prints in order to embody the birds’ migratory journey. They bear the wear and tear of the birds’ plumage and have travelled the miles of their migrations, so have a silent story to tell alongside their pristine counterparts.
The second project, “From a Home to a Home: a Story of Migration,” was a single exhibition in Melbourne where I invited artists with migrant and refugee backgrounds to create a work inspired by migratory shorebirds. It was a mixed media exhibition with a rich variety of works.
My third and ongoing project, “The Overwintering Project,” has been going since 2017. It invites Australian and New Zealand printmakers to create a print in response to their local migratory shorebird habitat, and send me two of those prints, one to sell and one to enter into the Overwintering Project Print Portfolio for exhibition. In addition, artists can hold their own exhibitions themed around their local habitat; there is no obligation for them to send me a work or donation, and works can be in any media. So far there have been over 20 exhibitions Australia-wide; artists have donated over 300 prints to the project and we have raised $23,000 so BirdLife Australia’s migratory shorebird research and conservation projects.
Printmakers
Just like the people at BirdLife, printmakers are a wonderfully generous community. I have met printmakers from all around Australia through my role as Vice President of the Print Council of Australia, a 50+ year-old organization created to foster printmaking in Australia. And, like the migratory shorebirds of the art world, prints are a poorly understood and not very visible medium! And, like shorebirds, printmaking is under threat. Department after department of tertiary printmaking studies is being closed in institutions across Australia. Just this year Griffith University in Queensland announced its intentions to close it printmaking department – which is the last tertiary course available in the state. There has been such an outcry from the Arts community that I believe this decision is under review, but it is a common threat today. So the other face of the Overwintering Project is to promote Australian printmaking.
The Overwintering Project: Western Port. The next Overwintering Project exhibition focuses on Western Port,in Victoria, Australia, a globally significant, unique environment. This is recognised through the heritage and custodianship of its traditional owners, the Mayone buluk and Yallock balug clans of the Bun Wurrung people and the Bulug willam clan of the Woi Wurrung, and its national and international ecological significance as a Ramsar site (or wetland of international importance), a Key Biodiversity Area and a UNESCO Biosphere.
Western Port has numerous overwintering sites for migratory shorebirds and is one of the most important areas for migratory waders (i.e. shorebirds) in south-east Australia.’
From March 6 to May 23, the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery will feature works in a variety of media created by a group of curated artists in response to the Western Port environment programs and alongside the Overwintering Project Print Portfolio. All welcome!
