What were some of the foundation ideas for this exhibition project?

I’ve been looking recently at fears, both my own and some universal ones. In this show I’m bringing together works on the fear of ghosts, floods, and death.

They are all photo-print works and embody the way these two media have become more elegantly entangled in my practice since the pandemic lockdowns when I didn’t have access to a press.

I’m sharing this show with printmaker and painter Kir Larwill who is also my co-director at Artpuff. We met as founding committee members for Castlemaine Press community access print studio back in 2014 and became friends. Remarkably, aside from group shows, this is the first time we will be showing together.

The exhibition is an Open Studio show for the Castlemaine State Festival and there is a small etching press at Artpuff, so at times I’ll also be making some embossings for one of my works in progress, Rumours.

How did the artwork selection take place?

The fear works are all series-based narratives, so I’m bringing together stories that I feel enhance each other, much like an anthology of ghost stories. I made the series Secret House earlier this year based on a haunted house and have just finished making Flood Story using photos from the recent floods. The Loddon River runs past my house, just over the levee, so this story tells of one of my personal fears.

Other story series include a continuation of my Body of Water series, and the first work from Where the Bodies are Buried. It will depend on the hang, too, as to what finally gets in.

How does the exhibition manifest – what do visitors experience?

Artpuff is an intimate space and I’m showing intimate works. Flood Story is big and winds like a river, but it’s told in a series of small squarish prints adhered to card. The presentation brings a cinematic quality to the storytelling. The Body of Water works are framed but also small, so you have to look into them.

Where the Bodies are Buried is a series of works in progress that I’ve decided to exhibit episodically. The work I’ll be showing, Cemetery Road, is in effect the first episode in a series of landscapes. The narrative is still in development, but I know this is where it begins. I have three other images so far (not on show) that also belong.  There is a darkness in my work at the moment, shadows everywhere. I enjoy dwelling conceptually in beautiful dark places.

I’m also looking forward to the hang and seeing what the visual dialogue between Kir and my work looks like. It will be illuminating to let the work talk for us in the space.

What are some of the key works and what subject matter do they deal with?

Body of Water explores my current interest in mirroring, and the spectral nature of reflective water. Dams represent our human effort to harness the wildness of water and provide sustenance through dry periods. Dams look both beautiful and vulnerable to me, hopeful of receiving sustaining rains and fearful of drought. Living in the country through multiple drought and flood cycles, you get to see how the bone-dry dam haunts the dam that is brimming today. A too-full dam also carries the threat of flood.

The Body of Water works describe the water cycle in simple form, from cloud, to rain, to dam, to vapour again. The series title alludes to the simultaneously present-absent bodies of ghosts, and a fugitive body of thought. Dammed water is symbolic of the conscious mind and what little we know of our vast unconscious self.

The series is ongoing. This time I’m showing Volumes 10-14. Volumes 1-9 of the series were made and exhibited last year. Each release has its own perspective and approach with the shared theme and format holding the wider series together.

 What is it about the printmaking experience that you most appreciate?

 There are so many things. The other day I was standing at the end of a press with artist Jane Rusden, after the second pull of her drypoint plate. Standing there talking about the smallest details of process and print was immensely satisfying. I love the way printmakers share insights and knowledge in the print studio – their understanding and questioning of all the variables and particulars in play. Time seems to disappear when I’m immersed in the intricacies of printmaking.

I also love the way printmaking processes introduce an otherness to the making of prints. The lateral reversals of imagery and vacillating positive and negative states suggest printmaking is a spectral technology. I also like how, in the moment of printing, the input of the press – the machine – happens out of sight, and on the other side of the juggernaut your print is returned to you. I find the surrender to that momentary distance entrancing. That relationship and exchange between printer and press is so intimate and, as we know, the moment of the reveal, when the printed image is peeled back from its substrate, can be sublime.

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Artpuff Open Studio, 23 March – 16 April 2023

artpuff.com.au

Artpuff, Studio 38, The Mill, 9 Walker Street Castlemaine, Victoria

Thurs-Sun 11-5 (+ public holidays)

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