Slow Making

Where does your timber come from?

2010-12-29T20:36:00.001+11:00

Using wood as the primary material for making demands a number of considered processes when selecting and buying one's timber. Firstly, where is it from? Secondly, how is it harvested? Thirdly, who profits from the harvesting? And lastly, who or what may be harmed in any part of the process?

Organisations such as Rainforest Alliance, FSC and numerous others have developed grading and certification systems - not all are as thorough or quite what they appear, but given the appalling practices in rainforest timber provision, no-one should buy and use any rainforest timbers without being very very sure that it is certified appropriately. Habitat loss, the murder of local Indigenous peoples, and support of regimes and elites such as Indonesia's military by Thai timber interests demand something more than a shrug and another 'oh well'.

Many FSC certified programs involve local landowners and workers processing the trees at least into roughly milled section for export, and often some tertiary utilisation as well. Peter Mussett's ongoing involvement with PNG and Solomon Island community based forestry leads to carefully stacked piles of kwila, New Guinea rosewood and walnut sitting in a yard and very very large shed in Welby, NSW - timber that has been sustainably harvested with minimal habitat disturbance, as well as ensuring that maximum economic benefit goes back to the community. The Woodage also stocks nothofagus from New Zealand produced by a FSC certified operation - a far more commercial enterprise than most of the PNG providers but evidence that sustainable timber harvesting + beneficial local economic outcomes = profitable timber businesses. A lesson Gunns seem to be realising if only to take advantage of the marketing opportunities.

Most FSC certified plantations or forests in the developed first nations are still usually harvested with high levels of mechanisation. But occasionally you come across someone such as the Streamline Timberworks in Floyd County, Virginia. As we begin to slowly come to terms with peak oil (even if the governmental response is still nothing more than hopeless) there are even more reasons for considering how we harvest timber than minimising habitat damage.

Where I live has what is probably the greenest timber mill in the eastern half of Australia. Situated on the edge of a large State forest, it processes radiata pine for the building industry, using timber from Wingello, Penrose, Belangelo and Meryla plantations. What can't be broken down into lumber either goes to the Visy Paper & Pulp Mill at Tumut or ends on garden beds as pine chips. The mill produces no waste, no water waste, has lowered its carbon footprint by modifying its drying processes and utilises only radiata from plantations.

The mill is owned a private family company - the plantations that is relies upon are State Forestry controlled. As NSW heads towards a change of governments in March 2011, the future of publicly owned forests is of concern as the more than likely O'Farrell government does have a conservative agenda of privatisation. Calls to the current shadow minister of Primary Industries, Katrina Hodgkinson, National Party member for Burrinjuck has seen assurances that an O'Farrell government has no plans to sell off the State Forests, at this stage. What Labor may be planning is anyone's guess - effectively there's no one answering the phones and it's proved a little difficult to get anyone at the Minister's office to answer questions concerning State Forests policies. As the State government of whatever persuasion is closer to broke than they're happy to admit, watch this space for sudden changes due to inclement financial conditions.

Moving on from the political shenanigans, the process of harvesting in State Forests whilst regulated by legislation is not policed as it ought to be (see for example investigations earlier this year concerning North Coast forests - the South Coast has also seen similar issues) and there are significant scientific questions about the harvesting processes currently employed. In single species plantations of exotics such as radiata pine, the protection of habitat is not critical, but harvesting methods can and do have significant impact in terms of soil erosion, spoilage of water courses, spreading of weed species. Whilst I think you'd have Buckleys getting anyone in Forestry to seriously consider using work horses in plantations, it should be investigated as a way of moving to true sustainable selective logging practices in native forests.

Plantation management poses some particular problems - as the State Forests are pretty much all operated as monocultural clear fell operations, the medium and long term problems are buried in the blizzard of so-called efficiencies of high rotation/ high output. In the Southern Highlands, the State Forests represent significant barriers to endemic species in terms of migration as they offer little in the way of migration belts or corridors. But its also what we're not growing that frustrates me. Joseph Maiden as director of the Botanic Gardens in Sydney did extensive work concerning mixed species plantations of native species at the end of the nineteenth century; including techniques for successfully cultivating red cedar which is usually attacked by the cedar tip moth. Maiden identified co-dependent species which not only protected the cedars, but could in turn be harvested and processed as well. Unhappily I say, State Forests NSW does not and has not put anything like the effort and funds into native species utilisation as it has done supporting radiata utilisation. Hence I can go to The Woodage and buy absolutely beautiful FSC certified Shining Gum which comes from.... Chile. What is coming onto the market from Australia is woodchip quality.

It is not heart warming that a country lucky enough to have endemic in its forests some of the finest cabinet timbers in the world, some of the structurally toughest building timbers has chosen to pursue a policy of radiata pine as the end all and be all of non-pulp timber production in planations. It is well and truly time for us to be debating what our State Forests should be growing, and how.

Printing poetry at Otago

2010-08-18T07:23:00.001+10:00

Twenty years ago, I visited Dunedin for a couple of days on a NZ touring holiday and loved it at first sight. I always hoped to get back here, and every time John Howard threatened to win an election, I would joke with my friends and family that I'd move to Dunedin if he did. I was getting quite serious when Kevin Rudd saved the day. Now I've made it back, thanks to a brilliant residency opportunity, and I'm telling people that if Tony Abbott wins, I may not go back to Australia. I'm getting quite serious about it.

The residency fell into my lap, through the generosity of master printer Alan Loney, who took it upon himself to introduce me to Donald Kerr, the Otago University Special Collections Librarian, when we were all at a conference in Brisbane called The Limits of the Book. Donald has custodianship of a wonderful collection of printing equipment, originally established as a bibliography teaching aid, and while continuing to be used as such, has also become a press in its own right: the Otakou Press. Established in 2003, it hosts an annual short-term printer in residence who produces a work that is sold – and usually sold out before the project is finished – and funds the next PIR the next year. The residency is now totally self-funded, and includes travel, accommodation (which includes food) and a stipend.

Donald and I had wonderful talks in Brisbane, about letterpress, the history of the equipment, and his liking of posters. Up to now all the printers had been New Zealanders, men, and had made books. Time for a change! We decided that I would be the 2010 PIR, and we would make posters, preferably using some of the wood type in the collection, which had scarcely been utilised.

We decided to have six poets, three from NZ and three from Australia. Donald picked out some names and emailed them all to see if they were amenable. Peter Porter and Les Murray were on his list, but PP died soon after, and we didn't hear from Les, so we ended up with Vincent O'Sullivan, Michael Harlow and Sue Wootton batting on the NZ side, and Robert Adamson, Sarah Holland-Batt and Stephen Edgar for the Aussie side.

And then Donald got a letter in the post from Les, who doesn't do computers. He'd LOVE to be in it. And, we both agreed, you can't say no to Les. So. We had SEVEN poets, and I just didn't have the time in the residency to add an extra NZer – seven was going to be pushing it. Did I mention that my edition is to be 100 of each, plus title page and colophon? That's 900 pages, over a period of six weeks.

There was only so much planning I could do beforehand, since I hadn't seen the type selection: read the poems (each poet sent a small selection of small, in most cases unpublished, poems to choose from) and select one for each, and make notes about what each inspired visually when I read them. We'd decided upon paper stock, and ordered it: Fabriano Rosapina, a lovely thick white Italian paper, that would need to be hand-torn into quarter-sheets.

The poems I picked didn't seem to have any connecting theme, apart from my liking them, so I decided to go with the idea that their number inspired and call the folio PRIME, playing with the idea of seven as a prime number and also that these are poets in their prime. Since then I have realised that the connection is one of process (in the use of wood type) and that the title could have reflected that, but I'm happy with Prime.

Then

Arriving at the University of Otago, settling in to my digs at the very comfy St Margaret's College, and getting to know my way around were all the easy things to do at the start of my residency. Dunedin is beautiful, even in the depth of winter, and surprisingly warmer than Canberra, owing to what everyone says is a mild winter. The big learning curve was tackling the presses in the print room...

I am used to printing with a cylinder flatbed letterpress, which has built-in rollers that ink the type and can be adjusted to stay at a level that rolls the type the same way every time. Here in Dunedin, they have iron hand-presses only, which means that the printer has to hand-roll the ink onto the type every time they pull a print.

The up side of that is that you can print multiple colours at once. The down side is that you have to develop a good technique of rolling sensitively to the type's needs, and evenly, and neatly. Every time. And I had to learn how to do it FAST, because there were those 900 pages to print, and time was ticking.

I'm talking in the past tense here, but as I write I'm still in the thick of it. I'm nearly halfway through my third week of the residency, and I'm only 300 pages in...

This is the Columbian press, the grand madam of the room. She's my press of choice from the three available to me, with her bobbing eagle counterweight and decorative dragons. I had a crash course in using her, including how to make my own brown-paper tympans and friskets.

The fact that I have to hand-roll the type, lower the frisket then the tympan, roll the bed under the platen and then pull the press handle for every. single. print. means that I am physically limited as to how intricate and/or layered these prints can be. I need to design them to be striking without being overly hard to produce.

I am also limited by the colours available to me. I can mix colours, but that means I also have to judge how much mixed ink I need for a print run, and the amount of ink varies according to how much surface area there is on the type; wood type is generally broad-surfaced and thirsty, whereas metal type is smaller and finer, needing finer layers of ink rolled with a lighter touch. When I first arrived, I only had blue, red, yellow, black and a transparent mixing white, but an ex-commercial printer who now works at the Uni of Otago library brought in a gift of some pristine tins of Pantone colours: a variety of reds (rhodamine, rubine, warm red, all fabulous and important distinctions when mixing colours), a green, orange and a good dense rich black that does not shade into grey like most offset blacks. A most welcome gift, and one I'm using gratefully.

The other limitation, or maybe I should say, addition to the palette of choices, is the type itself. The Otakou press has a house font, Garamond, which is one I use extensively in my studio as well. So there is a healthy amount of that, plus a number of drawers of assorted fonts like Gill, Imprint Shadow, Plantin, Gothic Condensed, but not in any great quantity or variety of sizes. There is also a lot of very beautiful wood type, in many sizes (wood type is measured in 'lines' but I don't know what 'lines' actually means).

So, to print a poem as a poster, no matter what my idea is, I have to find a font that not only suits the feel of the poem, but also has enough characters in the drawer to set the whole poem and whatever I want to use around the page. I had to count every character in every poem and make a chart of the alphabet needs so that for each layout I can make sure that I can make the poem before I get halfway through and discover that there aren't enough Hs or something. And you know poets... they tend to use strings of words with the same letters, even if they aren't conscious that they're doing it (I don't even mean alliteration or rhyme... I mean just repetitions of letters generally).

My first attempt was a shape poem by NZ poet Sue Wootton, called No Strings Banjo. Donald thought that this would be one of the hardest poems to tackle, but actually, making a shape in letterpress is fairly easy if you stick to the basic principles of keeping all the lines the same length and making a shape within a block, like building pixels.

This turned into this:

Please excuse the torn base and the handwriting; this was my bon-a-tirer (good to print) reference copy for editioning purposes.

I didn't know that Sue was from Dunedin until she walked into the studio for a peek, and to my delight she was delighted with the layout, and adored the Fancy Western wood type as much as I do.

I wasted a lot of paper on that first edition, until I worked out my rolling technique. Donald forgave me, as he knew I'd been chucked in at the deep end. I thought the edition printed ok finally, but I know that by the time I get to the end of the residency, I'll look back at the quality of this first run and shudder.

The next batch, because I had such a clear picture in my head of the print, was Les Murray's At the Opera. Donald wanted COLOUR, and so I decided to give him some red, a good patchy red velvet curtain of a large wooden M.

Like this one, all rolled up and ready to print as this:

Another thing that Otakou Press has in abundance are wonderful vintage image blocks, ranging from whimsical Victoriana through to cheesy ads from the 70s and 80s, before everything moved to polymer plate. Donald wondered if I might not use a couple, like this one:

He thought it might be a good way to illustrate the word lorgnette, which is the central premise of the poem, but I decided to keep everything typographical, to stay away from the ready-made images, and make people do what I suspect Les Murray wanted people to do: go and look up the word.

Now

So I'm beavering away, even on the weekends, because doing something every day is the only way I'll get everything done. I've had lots of visitors, including a bunch of wonderful librarians who have been helping me tear down the paper. Part of my brief was to promote the program locally, so I've had interviews with the local paper, the university paper and there's one coming up with the local tv station. I've talked to English students about working visually with poetry from a textual viewpoint, and to printmaking students about working with text as image and markmaking with moveable type.

I'm discovering how fast I can work if I only have one roller, and one colour, but that working fast gives me blisters. I printed 130 pages (I allow for bad printing!) in two and a half hours on Sunday to produce an under-layer for my Vincent O'Sullivan poem layout:

It's a poem about rocks in a river forming trains like bridal veils, so I've printed large pine type that has a distinct wood grain in a green-grey, and will make the three stanzas of the poem into charcoal-silver clumps that will have cool watery type trails.

While that layer dries, I'm working on the Stephen Edgar poem, a fabulous piece about imagining words in the air around oneself. While my inner vision is an airy one in dull colours, what has emerged from the type and colour resources (and Donald's yearning for colour) is quite different. It's early days yet, but I've pulled from the poem the notion of sunset revealing disintegrating words, so I'm using sunset colours of pinky-red and orange and black...

This is hot off the press this afternoon, my first tentative pull in one colour to see if the composition works. I'll be running this one through the press twice, like the O'Sullivan, which will cut into my time a bit. I can see the next two weeks being completely manic as I try to get everything printed in time for the folios to be collated by the last week. I've just finished talking to the most excellent university binder here about the folio design of black & white with a strip of overprinted proof inset into the front. Yum!

I have been blogging my Dunedin experiences, both printing and otherwise, at my personal blog, and there are more photos on my flickr page.

(BTW, If you're interested in purchasing Prime, you can contact Donald by emailing donald[dot]kerr[at]otago[dot]ac[dot]nz. Because the press is not-for-profit, they retail the PIR produce at very affordable prices, and pump all the money back into the residency. This folio of seven posters will be only NZ$250 plus postage and packing. We've already sold a third of the edition, so don't delay if you want one.)

Cross-posted at Ampersand Duck.

Social media at Slow Making

2010-08-17T09:33:00.003+10:00

One of the consistent themes of the new Craft Movement(s) is the role of digital technology - Web 2.0; net connectivity; social media... the small physical footprint of the technologies (though the environmental and social cost of its manufacture is not discussed and acted upon enough), the ephemeral nature of content matching the whimsy and vigour of much contemporary practice, the role of design software during making.

Handmade Nation which documents the rise of the new design, craft and making cultures in the US has a presence in the US as a film on the indie circuit as well as the book. It also has a Facebook presence with a Facebook page. The Slow Movement is not strongly represented - Slow Food sites tend to be focused on webpages, rather than using social media except as a way to get information about events etc out there. There's also Alastair Fuad-Luke's Slow Design space, originally set up in 2004 which is connected to New York's SlowLab. Both use webpages as their most significant Web presence.

Which brings me to the point of this post - we've set up a Slow Making group on Facebook. I might be completely missing the reason as to why social media forms such as Facebook are so successful but having a Facebook page seems too passive. We hope that people will want to engage with the idea, the processes, share information and perhaps even work toward workshops or an exhibition (real or virtual) or the like. Our hope is that a Facebook group will work to generate that engagement in a way that a Facebook page wont.

Then again, that might be completely wrong. Perhaps using something like Ning might be more appropriate; having a group you have to join. Whilst I agree with Clay Shirky about the potential of cognitive surplus, I suspect a lot of the reason for Facebook's success is that most of the actions and responses we are likely to do are really pretty passive - from Superpoking to even commenting on a friend's status, we're not doing much more than a digital version of raising an eyebrow or waving across a room. Which is fine - but Facebook may not be the right forum for Slow Making.

So let us know what you think, join the group if you're so inclined - theoretically any posts here on the blog should be linked up the wall of the group. And let us know about other social media based groups where ethical and green making, craft and design information and ideas are freely moving about - most of us would have had some connection with the Open Source movement. Is it possible to foster something similiar around Slow Making, or are there virtual spaces we should be connecting into now?

Swing

2010-07-08T15:04:00.006+10:00

Earlier this year, I received an invitation for a group show. The overarching concept embodied in the show's title, A Container of Memories, is as open as it is frustrating. Sometimes the most open of briefs are the most difficult.

Apart from the issue of memory, who had been invited to exhibit and why formed part of the intellectual process that might go into the design of the piece. What I knew as the Canberra School of Art in the late 90s (now known as SOA, ANU) had evolved from the courageous notion of a national craft school, based on the atelier system, launched in the early 1980s. An antipodean Bauhaus. The founder of the Woodworkshop, George Ingham, stood down as head of workshop in 1999, to be replaced by Rodney Hayward in 2000. The show was to involve students and visiting artists who had been part of the workshop over the last ten years, but also to perhaps remark upon the aesthetic memory any maker carries after going through a course.

Because my two undergrad years at CSA were those of George leaving and then a temporary head of workshop, the aesthetic baggage I might carry is more of the English modernism that Ingham exemplified than the European sensibilities of the Krenovian tradition that Hayward has brought to the workshop. This is partly due to aesthetic preferences I'd already formed and partly about disposition - I am really more of a tinkerer; hence describing myself as an object maker - it hides a multitude of sins. Curious about how to solve the problem in the simplest way possible. At times blind to the potential promise of decoration; unmoved by the gaudy qualities of timber. A mechanic's daughter. Rodney's legacy is for me most profoundly centred on his nuanced holistic philosophy of making not just as process but its unique intellectual space, combining head, heart and hand.

So - quite how do you respond to a brief called A Container of Memories?

Last year, the SOA Gallery hosted a retrospective of Ingham's work. And as always Ingham's miraculous virtuosity as a technician sang from the pieces and remains on display in the accompanying book. At the risk of incurring the wrath of the design gods, the sheer achieve of the thing can on occasion render a coldness to some of Ingham's pieces. A Brunellian mechanical clarity that fires one's inner engineer but doesn't quite warm the cockles of your heart. Discussing the show afterward, what I thought really interesting were the number of women who focused on two small cabinets Ingham made in 1990. A metre high by 150mm wide and deep, they were six sectioned cabinets with doors and a back panel each decorated in leather and a narrative line of decoration. Wall mounted, they sat at average eye level so the top of each was about 1800mm from the ground (I stand to be corrected on that figure). I do think George was a very gendered maker, particularly when his work is viewed against the work of his partner, Pru Shaw - but I suspect that was very conscious on Ingham's part. For whatever reasons, those two cabinets were seen as approachable and defined as such in ways that other pieces were not.

A couple of months before my daughter's tenth birthday in April, madam was in full flight about her plans to be an inventor. At ten, she still has a child's form - curiously rectilinear; three sectioned; legs, torso then head. A scale of about 2:3, the top of her head comfortable for resting one's crossed arms on; a large marionette. In full flight, her hands and feet were cutting a dancer's lines through the air, whilst her torso stayed centred and still. In that moment her form, its scale, reminded me of Ingham's two cabinets. But it also raised the issue of memory.

One of the enormous privileges of parenting is having the chance to play Jane Goodall to a gathering of children, to do fieldwork in their natural environments. And the surprising issues and thoughts that are so often raised either by their questions or observing their patterns and actions. Memory is particularly interesting, as the clarity children have about events that adults don't even note, the intense seizing onto some memory as validation of definition of self is no less certain than an adult's. Memory is the only means by which we can truly define the individual self - without our own and the interlocking memories of those around us in our social webs, we are no longer who we may believe ourselves to be. The insistence on memory as validation is just as intense with a four year old child as it is for a eight nine year woman struggling to retain her recall. But memory is not truth, nor concrete, nor permanent. Neurologically, it is a marvel of electro-chemical engineering balancing evolutionary pressures but truth as we might like to define it, has little use to a highly evolved primate as a principle of memory. How the neurons of memory are laid down, under what conditions, and the frequency and how with which it is recalled, profoundly affect each memory. The rise of numeracy and literacy within human cultures is a culturally evolved response to the limitations of human biological memory.

In that moment of my daughter reminding me of a cabinet, lay both the certainty that she wont remember that conversation - it being just a transient moment in the flow of a household - but equally that I will remember, that it will become one of my strongest memories of her as a child as her boundless enthusiasm, potential and embodiment of potential memories (the future is, after all, a memory yet to happen) were encapsulated in the moment of her twirling hands and feet and stilled torso.

So I have a basic form at this point, referencing Ingham's cabinets but I'd like to introduce an element of movement to suggest Mim's physicality as well as scaling and situating the piece in relationship to her ten year old size. Movement also adds a discourse about the cabinet as holder of aide de memoire - in most domestic settings, things, bits, pieces, objects, are grouped on display - in cabinets, on mantelpieces, bookshelves; artfully or otherwise. Things kept, held, are to whatever degree precious - placed objects in a cabinet are more precious yet, an exclamation point of notice. However, usually a display is static, and in Japanese aesthetics, an object worthy of display must be viewed only from a single perspective - honored by the right aspect. The static siting of an object is central to Ingham's two cabinets, the preciousness highlighted by the doors securing the space. Asking someone to place their preciousnesses in something that swings and spins will mean that the object will be viewed from perspectives not at all expected, and is also something of a headfuck - movement threatens the equilibrium of an object. The possibility of one's sixteenth century Korean tea bowl tumbling onto the floor and breaking is not a comfortable prospect for most people.

Initially I'd machined up some boards of blackwood, Acacia melanoxylon - the remainder of a flitch I had bought in about 1992 and carted around since. On dry fit, the grain and tonality were awful - my fine sentimental mutterings about the tree's demise on a roadside in northern NSW after a bout of careless Council spraying were not going to make it work. Urban salvaged oak I'd bought 12 or so years ago from Richard Parsons in North Richmond offered hope, but the boards were extremely deformed and twisted. An oak grown somewhere on the Cumberland Plain near Penrith promised interesting grain but equally promised all the appalling habits of evil bastard wood. The memory of its past life resides in the cambium, years of little rain in tightly lain down cell lines, the patterns of medullary rays opening up in the wet years. It machined up much better than I had expected, but to use 120mm long mitres on 9mm stock means the joints are not at all load bearing. This also meant I had to figure how to hang the cabinet without any of the joinery being weight bearing.

Physics also insisted that for the cabinet to hang true, there had to be some manner of adjustment. As the back is also solid timber, if the cabinet is set to hang when empty absolutely vertical front to back, it will tip forward with any objects in it. Using 1.2mm steel wire captured in automotive electrical grommets wedged onto the 4.76mm steel rod allows for line lengths to be finely adjusted and to hold when the cabinet is fully weighted. As the rods can also be shifted sideways, balance points can be found across the vertical from side to side if necessary. It's pretty simple, but it requires a degree of finesse, an engagement by its user to its built requirements, to remember why the adjustments may need to be made, to develop a routine of tweaking to ensure it sits true, shelf gaps are even, lines run parallel or at even angles. A memory of engagement.

Finally, the cabinet also contains the memory of movement. As it swings and spins, it is responding to the touch of a viewer, a gust of wind, the curiosity of a child, a bump from a dog or passing vacuum cleaner. It is made for a domestic space, and as such will hopefully respond to the ebbs and flows of movement and being. In its name, Swing, what it will do is given but it also ties back to the moment with my daughter. For most of us, a common metaphor of childhood would be those hours spent on a swing - exhilarated, thrilled, terrified, expectant, exultant, comforted, held. Swing offers to hold the things that perhaps matter, the aide de memoire of precious.

A Container of Memories - SOA Gallery, ANU, Canberra
July 8 -31, 2010

Uncommon Press

2009-10-26T18:20:00.001+11:00

A few months ago I watched a remarkable television show: Stephen Fry and the Gutenberg Press. Maybe you watched it too; because I'm a letterpress printer, I've had a lot of people ask me if I saw it. I did: it was part investigation into the way Gutenberg had earned his reputation as the Father of Letterpress, and part documentary about the recreation by a group of British press enthusiasts of a wooden hand press similar to Gutenberg's.

If you did watch the show, you'd remember that Gutenberg didn't actual invent the press itself, as hand presses had been used for printing woodblocks before his time. No, he is the Father of Letterpress for inventing a process to easily cast individual metal letters for the purposes of printing. It was much more of a jeweller/blacksmithery type of invention, really, and of course it revolutionised information technology as the world knew it.

While I was watching the show I remember thinking that, in my limited experience of Australian letterpress, and in my broader virtual observances of overseas letterpress, there seems to be two kinds of letterpress enthusiasts: those who live for the print, and those who love the machines. I've only known one person who combined elements of both, and he produced beautiful work.

Myself, I'm a print person, someone who loves what the process does rather than the process itself. I'm not particularly interested in the machines, and when something goes wrong with a press I'm working with, I’ll try to fix it intuitively, but if that doesn’t work I’m not afraid to look girlie and call people who are much handier with a spanner and screwdriver than I.

Canberra has a Museum of Printing quite close by in Queanbeyan; it's full of machines of different vintages, and that use different technologies, from iron presses to platen presses to cylinder presses and a working linotype machine. It was set up from the remnants of the Queanbeyan Age newspaper, and the people who run it (all volunteers, many of whom worked on the newspaper) love their machines. They get them working, they maintain them lovingly, and they print off the odd souvenir flyer to show the public what the machines can do. I don’t think there's a lot of print production happening there, and because I don’t worship the machines, I don't go there very often, which is quite remiss of me.

I bet all the QPM volunteers watched the Stephen Fry/Gutenberg show, and marvelled over the building of the wooden press; I bet they don't know, like I didn't, that a similar labour of love was happening just down the highway a bit. In Australia? Where most of our presses have been scrapped? Where it’s impossible to buy new metal type? Where the once quite healthy private press movement is now almost completely non-existent? Really?

Yes, really.

Let’s start with a little bit of printing history, a bit of context. I listed some printing presses above, but you probably don't know what I mean. Forgive me if I make a mistake here, I'm not a print history expert, I've just absorbed a few things in the time I've been involved with letterpress.

So, this is a press very similar to the one used by Gutenberg.

It is a wooden hand press, with most of the parts being wooden, and only some of the moveable parts of it made from metal, because it was very expensive to use metal at the time, as you can imagine. In fact, this press technology was the dominant form of print production for centuries, until the industrial revolution allowed metal casting to be a lot cheaper and large cast shapes were made possible. This allowed people to produce much more durable designs and you start getting presses that looked like this:

These are called iron hand presses. Similar concept to the hand press, in that you lay the type flat and press the paper onto it. Anyway, with all that marvellous industrial production capacity, from this point on press development went gangbusters, like everything else in the modern world, and presses changed shape rapidly over two centuries:

(That one is very similar to Miss Kitty, my beloved press.)

(Snaps to the marvellous Five Roses Press site for most of these images, a marvellous place to learn about letterpress.)

That first, wooden press is called the Common Press, because while there were many variants and slight improvements (and, I’d say, complete wackinesses) to its design over the centuries of its dominance, commonly they were all wooden with metal screws.

I'm pretty certain that, up to now, we haven't had a Common press in Australia, as we were colonised around the time of the Iron Press. Did you know that the First Fleet had a press on board? I read somewhere that there was no-one able to use it, so it festered in a hut for many years before being hauled out and put into use. One day I'll find that fact again and actually write down the details.

I received a hand-addressed letter a month or so ago, in gorgeous penmanship of a kind I haven’t seen in years. I had only seen the sender once in the last fifteen years, and that was only a few months before the letter arrived. He's one of those wonderful eccentric Australian people that set themselves up in the bush and do whatever the hell they want and the rest of the world can be buggered. When you get talking to them, they've had an interesting life, and are usually very well educated. This man, Richard Jermyn, is no exception.

I don't know a lot about Richard Jermyn. I've been told various stories, such as he is an ex-Navy man; he was an architect, so forth. I don't really know what is true and what apocryphal from the various stories. What I do know for certain is that he has a strong interest in letterpress and printing, and used to have a private press in the bush near Bemboka, NSW called the Indian Head Press, named for a nearby peak in the Bega Valley. He lived near my parents, who have a lot of respect for him, and they took me to meet him when I first started showing an interest in type and printing. I lost contact with him; he sold his Bemboka property and moved further south. Apparently he gave a lot of his equipment to the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, and only kept the basics, and that’s the last I heard for a long time.

Then earlier this year I taught a bookarts workshop in Bega, and he popped in to say hello. I had a couple of my fine press books with me, and I was delighted when he looked through them seriously, with care and attention to detail, and then looked at me soberly and said 'good pressmanship' with the same sense of approval that the farmer says 'good pig' to Babe at the end of the movie, and I felt so happy I thought I would burst. I have had the pleasure of having my books admired by good people, but when an experienced pressman praises, it really means something.

So, the letter. It was only a computer-generated and photocopied invitation, but the content was very exciting.

Of course I went, how could I not? I took my mother, a local historian who could also appreciate the importance of the occasion. It was a most enchanting experience: driving down the highway to the furthermost eastern corner of the state, turning into a rough narrow dirt road just off the main road to discover a large green Colourbond shed surrounded by the usual scrap and detritus that is common to most farm barns, plus a rugged vegie patch and a rudimentary washing line full of simple clothes: shirts, worker's shorts, socks. Outside the door of the shed was a table set up with wine and nibblies. Not wanting to drink, I asked for something non-alcoholic, and was poured a glass of water from the tap attached to the rainwater tank.

A bit of chat with the others gathered around – mostly friends and press-making collaborators, only one other person having anything to do with printing – and then we were allowed into the 'Tin Tent' to discover a completely different world.

I was expecting... I guess I was expecting the usual printer's set-up, arranged around the inside of a green tin shed. I wasn’t expecting the ambience of hand-cut wooden beams and carefully yet carelessly arranged arrangements of various collections – saws, lathes, timbers, chains, plugs, books, tins. among many, many collated things – up the walls and on a big mezzanine that is obviously a living quarters as well.

It was a living working space, one indistinguishable from another.

Richard had arranged for some local musicians to sit up on the mezzanine level with violin and harpsichord.

They played (exquisitely) from above as we entered and saw, in a cleared space at the far end of the shed, the press that Richard and a group of friends had built by hand.

You see this picture? Look at this:

It was gobsmackingly wonderful to stand and look at this working replica of early printing history. I can’t begin to convey how privileged I felt to be there when it pulled its very first print.

I had borrowed my mother’s digital voice recorder, and managed to record Richard’s opening speech.

I’ll provide a bit of it here, to give you an example of the gobsmackery:

This was started at the beginning of the year; I think the first of January I started to first put plane to wood. I might just go through quickly a bit of the language of the common press, the various parts, and you’ll see on the printed matter that I’ve made a bit of an explanation and some of the background, but basically this press was derived from plans … from a double volume book called The Common Press, which is the documentation of the common press that is in the Smithsonian Institution in America. Without the plans in this book I would not have contemplated it, but I looked at it and thought ‘I’ll have a go at this’. Just shows the things you can do in a moment of rashness.

The original plans called for oak, elm, beech timber, and the big departure has been that this is not European timber, this is all Australian hardwood. This is where Les and other people have come in. So, from the bottom down: the Feet are the hobs of the Tathra Wharf (there’s a story behind every piece), the Cheeks are (pretty ratty, you can see the difficulty of getting big enough timber)… basically wharf timber from North Bega.

These pieces... that’s the Head, and the other big lump down the bottom, that’s the Winter; those two pieces take the whole of the impression. These are dove-tailed into the cheeks, there’s a big dovetail running up in here, top and bottom, and those pieces take the whole pressure of the press, and these are Roads and Traffic Authority guideposts.

[laughs from viewers, someone says: they don’t make guideposts like that anymore!]

You can see a bit of the original timber there, I’ve written the dimensions there: 8 1/4 x 7 3/4 x 24 3/4, and that’s the offcut. So that’s the Winter. And somewhat ironically, the Summer is this little strip here...

If you want more of that verbal tour, you can download the files and hear for yourself. I’ve broken it into chunks, and apologies for some of the incidental noise, especially my iphone beeping at me. I taped until I stopped to have a go myself. None of the chunks are more than six or seven minutes:

Part 1: Richard Jermyn: Acknowledgement of the local Aboriginal peoples (this is about 30 seconds; I didn't mean to separate this out from the rest of the acknowledgements, but I was experimenting with the sound software)

Part 2: Richard Jermyn: thanking all those who were involved

Part 3: Richard Jermyn: Details about the parts of the press and what materials they used.

Part 4: Richard Jermyn: a live recording of pulling the first print

Part 5: Richard Jermyn: more live printing

Part 6: Richard Jermyn: an explanation of the metal screwthread and how it was made

The detail, the terminology, it’s all something you’d expect to see and hear in a museum, but it’s alive and well in a tin shed in Pambula. Amazing. Apparently this press will outlive anything built in European wood, thanks to the hard woody goodness of our Australian timbers.

Look at that woodcut of early printing again. See the inkballs used for printing? Richard had even put together a couple of those, made with wooden handles, horsehair and the remnants of a friend’s leather jacket. They worked really well, and he put a friend on printing duty while he supervised the press working.

On dabbed the ink, the paper (dry, not damp: he didn’t dampen machine-made paper) was inserted onto the guides, the tympan (made from real vellum) lowered onto the frisket and the whole lowered onto the forme (which is the locked-up type). Then he got friends to turn the handle that moved the type under the platen, and pull the lever that lowered the platen onto the type to make an impression. That prints the first page. Then the forme is rolled further along and the second page of the sheet is printed.

When the tympan was lifted to reveal a (fairly roughly) printed page, we all sighed deeply, no one more than Richard himself, who had very bravely and generously waited until we were all assembled to see if his press actually worked. This is what we took turns printing:

Don’t bother counting the typos: we know they are there, but there wasn’t time to change them, because the music was playing, and the wine was being slurped, and we were all taking turns to use the inkballs and turn the handle, and pull the lever – which, incidentally, explained a lot to me about why there weren’t many women in the trade. It’s hard work to pull that lever! I don’t think I could possibly print on that press regularly, although it would be akin to working out on a rowing machine, and probably very good for me.

>Just in case you can’t see the image, the book he used to build the press was called The Common Press: being a record, description & delineation of the early Eighteenth Century Handpress held in the Smithsonian Institution by E. Harris, C. Sisson (London: Merrion Printers, 1978). He used local craftsmen to help with timberworking and the blacksmithing.

He showed me the book after we stopped printing (only because we ran out of paper!) and it is incredibly detailed, with cross-sections, x-rays of inserts, plans and materials. Still, there’s no way I would look at something like that and think ‘I could do that’. I only do that with pictures of things people have printed.

I think everyone came away from the Tin Tent that day feeling privileged and excited. Richard had invited the local media but they didn’t show, and it’s their loss. Richard told me that he has happily spent $10,000 building this press. There is a thread on Briar Press about the possibility of building such a press, and I can’t wait for Richard to receive the praise he deserves for achieving it. He hopes to move it to somewhere more accessible, but in the meantime he will show it by appointment to anyone who is interested. You can read his contact details on the letter at the start of this post, otherwise feel free to email me and I will pass on his details. If you want to see more images of the press and the day's proceedings, go to my flickr set.

Richard Jermyn

[cross-posted at Ampersand Duck the website and Spike, the Meanjin blog]

What's Next?

2008-11-13T17:23:00.002+11:00

The video below comes from the US based environmental journal, Orion. In many ways, it is a very immediate response to the election of Barack Obama as the next President of the United States. But it also asks that all-pervading question that we do have to address.

What's next?

And it is a very pertinent question for makers, artists, craftspersons.

What's Next? from Orion Magazine on Vimeo.

As a number of the speakers said, understandings and ways forward are best articulated by art, literature, making. In these spaces can we imagine what we haven't yet imagined or made real - some are solutions, some are arguments, some are reasons why things can't just run along the same tired course.

And if we the makers, the artists, are going to contribute what I think we certainly have to, our bit of answering a part of that 'What Next' question in the here and now, what are some of the possibilities we might offer?

Shall we be Luddites? Shall we be ethical? Shall we be the jesters? Shall we tell our neighbours, our families, our children about the emperor's clothes? Shall we engage, finding new pathways through virtual worlds of possibility? Shall we make beauty? Shall we be the solution, not part of the problem?

The touch of words

2007-10-27T21:56:00.000+10:00

Every few years I get the chance to set a batch of poetry by hand to print using letterpress. It's a different thing to my usual piecework setting individual lines for titles or colophons. It's also a completely different thing to typing anything on a computer.

Have you ever stopped to think how many words we can write on a daily basis without effort? With computers, word production is almost inexhaustible. Churn out the letters, wipe them out if they're not working, print them out as many times as you like.

Old-fashioned letterpress (as opposed to linotype or monotype) is set letter by letter, side by side, line by line. It is a slower process than handwriting, but they are closely connected in relation to keyboarding. The personal effort made when writing legibly by hand closely connects the writer to the page, to the words, to the intention behind the words. The process is slow enough to allow the writer to consider very carefully the next word, the next line. I don't think computer keyboarding allows this to the same extent, although as I'm not a professional writer I'm not really qualified to make such a generalisation. But look at how much superfluous text is being generated out there, if only in blogosphere!

When I set a poem by hand, I think about these things. I can't think with too much absorption, otherwise I will set the wrong word. It's a bit like driving a car across the Nullabor plain: you can see a truck coming for hours, but if you don't concentrate, you'll still hit the bugger head-on when it finally comes close, even though there's nothing else around for kilometres. You can know the line of text you're setting off by heart, but if your mind wanders, typos creep in. But... the mind always seems to wander.

In Australia, we have very few letterpress resources. There are no foundries anymore, casting fresh metal letters (or none that I know of, please tell me if you know of any); if you're keen enough, you can have fresh type shipped over from the US or the UK, but they sell it by weight, and it's heavy stuff. Consequently a lot of what is here is quite worn.

To set my book of poems (I'm working on a selection by Nan McDonald), I am using what was, when I started, a reasonably full case of Bodoni 12pt roman. Enough to print 14 poems, but only if I set four pages at once, then pull them apart and set the next four pages. My first page printed was a shock. This is a case of type that has been used by students and staff in an arts institution for many years, and at a technical college for years before that. Consequently many of the letters are very worn (giving them a 'thick' look when inked) or chipped. I started to make a box of this worn type as I substituted it for letters in better shape, and keeping it separate as I dissed the type back into the tray. I'm now almost halfway through the printing of the book's text, and each page looks better at the first pull.

Some letters wear faster than others. Anything with a serif on an ascender or descender is in danger: b, d, k, l, p, y. Pointy letters: w, m. Dotty letters: i, j. And the letter r is becoming particularly scarce. Some letters get recycled so often that they become friends. I have a particularly sharp r that I put aside as I diss to use in prominent words in each poem. And yet I have an overflowing compartment of the letter c, most of them new. The problem is, I can't use the new ones because they look strange next to all the worn letters. Luckily the thickness of the paper I'm using (280gsm) allows the different height of the worn type to be accommodated. I'm letting it bite ever so slightly into the paper, without 'show through' on the other side.

I don't want my pages to be perfect. I'm happy with the slightly uneven look I'm achieving, otherwise I might as well just print this book from an inkjet printer. However, when I say 'prominent' words I mean that. As you read a poem, there are times when a words leaps out at you, and in this case it's for all the wrong reasons. You want the type to be invisible in a way, to let the meaning of the words exist independently. If a word is leaping out at you because it's thick, dull and broken, it's unfair to the reader. But the warmth of a handprinted page is delightful, ranging from dark greys to a dense black. It's a small challenge for the spoilt eyes of a modern reader, to whom variety in print quality means the ink heads are a bit clogged, something to be fixed. It is the finite (and rapidly dwindling) number of letters that made me think about the preciousness of words set or written by hand. Poets are, by their nature, careful with words. It is a marvellous experience to get so intimate with a piece of writing. You may think your eyes and your mind caress a word as you read it, but imagine holding that word, piece by piece, and thinking about all its layers and nuances as you ease it into place (albeit upside down and back to front!).

Poets are also fond of alliteration, and patterns within their text. This time bend your brain to the frustration of knowing that you're about to run out of 'r's and 'k's and meeting this line:

Dark its death-shining where the rocks rise black,

Gah! That's when I take my tweezers and pull a few letters out of another set poem, hoping to hell that I don't damage the top of the type with the tweezers as I ease it out.

And then I start setting again, and invariably my mind wanders. These are some of the things I've found myself thinking:

-- Many people think that newspaper compositors in small country towns over the last couple of centuries would have been rough working men. In fact, they were probably the most educated men in the region. They had to be able to spell, set, edit and proof, and print. They were the hub of the community. I've been enjoying dipping into Elizabeth Morrison's Engines of Influence over the past couple of years and finding out things like this.

-- This issue of type running out as you’re setting it probably forced a number of changes to text that writers hadn’t wanted. I’d say there are numerous cases of sly compositors substituting words for others that had more readily available letters in them, especially for newspapers and cheap novels. These days we edit for style, and for economic factors (ie reducing the number of pages or a column length) but before automated typesetting I’m sure a lot of changes were made at the grass-roots level (the kinds of changes sub-editors can do these days out of ignorance! ;))

-- Someone commented to me the other day that the colonial notion of relying on a 'mother country' like we used to with the UK has sort of come full circle with letterpress and other outdated technologies. When Australia was first established, we had to drag printing presses across the world, and type and everything else, and getting replacement bits was time consuming and expensive. (Did you know that the First Fleet contained a printing press, but no-one who knew how to use it, so it sat around Port Jackson for about 20 years?) Then we caught up with technology, and were pretty self-contained. Then we fell behind, because all the fancy new offset stuff was progressing in the US and Europe. So Australians ditched all the old things and fully embraced the new; we are now forerunners in cutting-edge print technology. This is bad news for anyone wanting to resurrect the old stuff (like me, and anyone into photo-etching), because as a nation we've chucked it all, or melted it down into scrap, or turned it into wall plaques. Gah!

-- Imagine being the compositor for Gertrude Stein's books! Or James Joyce! All set by hand! eek! If anyone made a mistake, who would notice! Did the authors notice? Or do you think they would have been delighted with the accidental shift in their phrasing?

-- Leonard Woolf thought setting and dissing type would be good for Virginia's nerves, which is one of the reasons why they started a press. It probably was, for a while, but I noticed when reading both of their biographies that after about 5 years they contracted out the setting to a professional compositor, then printed the set text themselves. Wise man, that Woolf.

-- I'm obviously playing the right music, all the students have taken their ipod earplugs out to listen.

-- Gee this type makes my fingers dirty.

Ahem. Of course, once set, the text can be printed out numerous times, thus making it more accessible than handwritten text, but not as quickly as computer printed text. And digital printing is faster again. But that's the history of typesetting in a nutshell, isn't it? And somehow the slowness of the production, the time taken to make this text appear, is something that works for me. I get to ingest the words, letter by letter. It brings the poems to life.

Whether it does so for the reader at the other end is another story altogether.

Cross-posted at Ampersand Duck and Sarsaparilla

The Last Seamstress

2007-07-18T18:46:00.001+10:00

We sat in a café bar in that very Canberra version of a CBD called Civic. We sat at a table that tipped when leant upon, drinking from cups that were uncomfortable to hold. We talked, debated & gossiped through the problems of making, of living ethically, of finding a niche in which to sustain both practice & self.

Consider this I said. Simply as a metaphor for examining the practice of design as it exists. What if we were to view it as a hierarchical process, and take the language of the fashion industry & apply it to objects, to furniture & perhaps indeed the patriarch, architecture? Let me explain.

Haute couture represents the experimental, the outlandish, the breathtaking accomplishment of skill & technological mastery of materials. Displayed on the forms of the impossibly beautiful, they are staged as any curator could wish. Dazzling its audience with chutzpah, these are not clothes to be worn. They are art, directions, the next season’s whims that will appear as vague reference only on the prêt-a-porter racks. In fact many are impossible to wear, even if you are 6’2” & 35 kilos.

Design I argued has a very strong parallel existence. Studio furniture, as our American cousins call it; the one-off object meticulously made; the site specific installation; the design icon. In these spaces, the agendas of design and form are established, the iconic defined, the desirable fetishised.

Let us move onto prêt-a-porter. In clothing, here we see & acknowledge the echo of haute couture, in cloth & colour selection, cuts & falls, Patsy’s accessorising. And indeed some of the prêt-a-porter ranges can be & are fetishised but the haste of taste’s onward rush to next season will sweep many of the racks clear. In design of objects (& buildings) something rather odd seems to happen. Objects that began as either space or time specific things, can be reproduced, standardised and resold again and again, losing the specificity of their original design impetus, but remaining as icons, icons which you can buy & place in your own personal kingdom of minimalist home-as-gallery.

Then of course, there’s Wal Mart. Endless aisles of poly cotton leisure wear, roughly made garments that most of us wear most of the time. Furniture & objects fare no better, with mega centres full of imitations of its branded prêt-a-porter cousins, or imagined representations of the resort, colonial, Georgian, Victorian, moderne, funky or chunky. Every aberration of the smorgasbord of aesthetic can be bought on hire-purchase with no deposit. (That your non-deposit terms are actually paid for by the workers who made these things, paid for by the unsustainable plundering of resources, paid for by the huge ecological debt we shall leave behind, does not appear in your terms & conditions at the time of purchase)

The curious thing is the slippage that happens with objects, with furniture, where they begin as haute d’object, and over time, become mythologised as manufactured icons, revered as iconic, but having economically devolved to prêt-a-porter. For example, Ludwig Mies van de Rohe & the Barcelona chair. At ridiculous expense and with ridiculous difficulty, two were made for the Spanish Pavilion at the World Trade Fair in 1932. They had one role only - for the King & Queen of Spain to perch upon during their brief appearance opening the pavilion. Modernist thrones. They were upholstered in white leather, and the steel forms now so familiar, were much more strongly curved. They also fell apart. Ludwig, master businessman, was approached by manufacturers interested in reproducing them, and numerous firms attempted to do so, defeated by the technical difficulties of welding steel into a structure that did not fail, until Knoll, using techniques developed during war-time production , arrived at about the eight modification of the form and began to mass manufacture the chair in 1948. The upholstery was now black, & the seating platform sloped more aggressively to the back. Making the chair ridiculously uncomfortable for anyone who is not over 6’4” with disproportionately long legs.

None of which really matters if your aim is to frame & articulate the relevance of monarchy in modern Europe of the 1930s in a particular setting at a particular moment. A modern monarch needs a modern throne. And architects & designers need royal patrons. Ludwig was a very astute businessman (just ask Dr Farnsworth). But when that object is mass produced, mass marketed as an example of a new beast called a design icon, the specificity of its original role must be lost – selling a chair to the middle-classes of America who bear the proud mantle of enemies of despots & defenders of freedom is not going to be terribly successful if its origins as a resting place for royal tuberosities are not quietly forgotten.

Curious & curiouser is that the chair has become an exemplar of good design. If you mean by good design that it is a visual form that has established longevity in the aesthetic marketplace, and is still saleable to a consumer market at a very good return to the manufacturer & retailer, then obviously it is very very good. But if your understanding of good design encompasses postural health for the user, comfort, ease of egress & longevity of the structure & materials, it fails on all counts. The webbing sags, the cushions collapse, the leather splits, the welds break & its form reduces most of us to ungainly shuffling sideways out of a collapsed seating position which induces discomfort in most people after about fifteen minutes. If your notion of good design expects those issues to be addressed & resolved, then it is very very bad. So what on earth do we think is meant by good design?

But we have to move away from using the terms good & bad – they are too morally loaded. Perhaps careful and careless design is clearer. Much of what sits in the design icon canon I would call careless design.

Ah, she said, but what about the seamstress? Where do we, who have no wish to pursue the chimera of designing for mass manufacture, who do not wish to make baubles of status for the rich, who have no wish to make site specific pastiches of contemporary design, but who instead wish to engage in a considered and thoughtful way with the needs of our communities, to make objects that speak of care, of addressing & resolving need in the most appropriate manner according to budget, according to use & according to our aesthetic – where are we?

Where indeed.

If economies of scale dictate that successful design is saleable design, or an object carries a status of exclusivity to allow the maker to achieve a reasonable return on a design & making process, is there still a place for those of us who do not have these aspirations? C.’s primary concern is about achieving what I would call careful design, about making objects that help the user perform their task in comfort, that pleases them visually, that delights them when touched or used, that will last longer than a couple of years before falling apart, that is about an equitable exchange between maker & user that speaks to them both about their shared humanity. It is about care.

Much of the modern design canon did originate as site-specific objects, designed as haute d’object, which have since been mass manufactured, often with significant compromises to aesthetic or structural solutions of the originals in order to maximise manufacturing ease & profit. They are, as an examined individual object, prêt-a-porter objects, bearing however the status & meaning of haute. And they have become the everyday understandings of that loaded dog – good design.

Yet much of it is not careful design. They tip over or are unstable, they cause discomfort, they may be difficult to clean or maintain, they perform their intended functions poorly, and they are often visually very out of place in the domestic environment. The rise and rise of the minimalist open space domestically much more successfully accommodates the design icon in its gallery-like sterility.

Objects bear cultural meanings, which can be easily manipulated by the market to affect consumer behaviour, and the rise of the design icon in the West after WWII would seem to have come more from successful campaigns by manufacturers such as Knoll or Herman Miller than out of a sudden flowering of design consciousness. Indeed, if people believe good design to be about iconic status, and not about careful design that resolves the issues of use aesthetics, this suggests a very low level of design consciousness.

But perhaps that misses the point as to why people buy these objects. The desire to own a van der Rohe chair or Arad bookshelf, or commissions a high status artist/maker is to engage with the dominant aesthetic & taste regime, and to, as a corollary, bask in the assumed shared status of taste, wealth & knowledge. A pair of Aalto’s Paimio chairs will succinctly transmit one’s wealth & taste much more successfully that a carefully considered and well made set of chairs from a maker in your locality. Assuming one’s only criteria for good design is iconic design.

There is that delicious moment in Raiders of the Lost Ark: III where our hero, Jones, Indiana Jones, must choose the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper. Choosing wrongly has been shown to be rather terminal. And Mr Jones, as a good archaeologist would, chooses the simple cup of a carpenter. Historical relativism is alive & well in Hollywood. But let’s play a parlour game of other choices – the fundamentalist Christian choosing a Richard Slee style McMansion cup emblazoned with ‘God Inc – Your Salvation Guaranteed – Insert Credit Card Here’; the princes of the established churches brawling among themselves over the appropriate depiction of a wedded couple & our design Mafiosos picking that rather gorgeous Philippe Stark piece that falls over when filled with liquid.

Appropriate design is, like beauty & humour, in the eyes of the beholder. Meaning & status are certainly codified by social & economic conditioning, but how in our consumerist world does an object stand up to the stresses of its competing meanings? This has been endlessly dissected, but to what effect? Peer-reviewed journals brim with lucid papers, conferences hum to the nuanced philosophising of object & meaning, corridors of Mr Casaubons echo to the furious tapping of keyboards, but still this curious definition of good design privileges the visual & intellectual, ignoring the careful, the known, the experienced, the vernacular, the bricolage of use.

In a society where the object has become so tied to its economic role, can the seamstress expect to have an audience, a clientele? Should she simply accept the irrelevance, the redundancy of her aspirations in the face of economic rationalism, market forces, the taste masters, and find another avenue for her expressed role of care? Should she join the club & spare us all the inconveniences of her ethics? But what will we have lost when the last seamstress sews no more?

Slow making websites & blogs

2007-06-29T07:59:00.000+10:00

Things are moving very slowly here at Slow Making - not entirely intentionally. However, it hasn't been deserted.

One of the key benefits of the web is the ability to be able to engage with a milieu through links - which can lead you to some fantastic places, and raise notions & thoughts & engagements difficult to replicate through other medium.

For makers and designers interested in the idea of Slow Making, peeking into the world of other makers or artists is invaluable. How do other people address the problems of ethically procuring materials? Balancing the contemplative making process with the pressures of making a living? Presenting their work, selling their work ethically? As well as the visual richness of other work, other solutions and other processes.

The web has also thrown up some intriguing possibilities about communication generally. Websites & blogs offer the maker a platform to present their work & their philosophies in a far more direct and unmediated way than the usual means. Rather than marketing slickness, demographic targets and sales results, a maker's blog or website can be about the specific of practice, place and principle.

So - if you are a maker, artist or designer who has their own website or blog that you think reflects a making philosophy within the Slow Making gambit, either email your url or post it in comments. We will put up a list of Slow Making blogs & websites in the right hand sidebar of the blog. And we will check & monitor them to keep out the gremlins as much as possible.

Sourcing Materials

2006-10-08T21:10:00.000+10:00

One of the key issues I'd like to see Slow Making discuss is the ethical procurement of materials. This is not simply a matter of going to NGO or governmental sources for a list of environmentally & socially responsible manufacturers or producers. Why? Because there is a plethora of differing standards, and of course, vested interests who have argued for ethical criteria to be compromised by virtue of economic rationalism.
Taking timber products as an example, there exist guidelines from UN bodies, the EU, green groups, industry based bodies, and national, state and local governments. I'll expand on this in another post, but in the last week there has been a disturbing but illuminating case of a timber product manufacturer receiving an ecology award for an endangered species project they have been involved in.
Gunns Tasmania will be familar to most people for their appalling record of forestry management practices in Tasmania. They have failed to gain EU certification for their timber products & have also engaged in political processes with both state and federal governments here in Australia to further their commercial operations. Their relationship with the Trades Hall in their home state is also highly problematic. Recently, they lodged writs against 20 people, claiming that their criticisms of Gunns' activities had had a negative impact upon the company's profile and profit line. This is known as the Gunns 20 case http://www.gunns20.org/ & is simply an attempt by the company to silence anyone who raises concerns about either their forestry or political activities.
At the end of last month, Gunns won an award for environmental management in forestry, involving habitat preservation for the endangered Ptunnarra Brown Butterfly. While it is important to acknowledge that they are doing something other than destroying habitat, it is also extremely important to examine from whom the award came.
The award was given by the Australian Environment Foundation, which was founded in 2005. With a high profile media identity as chair, the Foundation claims to be an evidenced based group - "practical environmentalists". They also have links to a right-wing thinktank, the Institute of Public Affairs and forestry groups. As you can see from this discussion, their claims to impartiality are highly problematic. http://larvatusprodeo.net/2006/10/05/a-tinge-of-green-with-a-pungent-astroturfy-smell/
While it may be easy at this point to identify a clear conflict of interest as regards the awarding body & Gunns, it will still allow Gunns to trumpet the award as an indication of their green credentials, and by inference the green credentials of their timber products. For makers who may use these materials, ascertaining the ethical standing of such materials then becomes harder and harder. It will also allow Gunns to negotiate with governments & assessing bodies, claiming that their products should receive environmental credentials that are not at all consistent with their overall practices. Practices that include using herbicides banned in the EU to spray logged areas using aerial cropdusters.
Clearly, we need to vigorously analyse the process of accreditisation for "green products or processes" to ensure that we are not misled by practices such as astro-turfing. This is difficult, & time consuming for individual makers, designers or artists to do, but it is exactly the sort of database that Slow Making can help to build and develop.
Producing a list of ethical materials and suppliers seems to me to be a key role for Slow Making. If you have good, bad or indiffferent examples, let us know, and we can work to producing a truly evidenced-based list.

The Way Forward?

2006-10-04T07:49:00.000+10:00

For Slow Making to evolve into something more than an interesting notion, it's going to need input, comment & debate among people who are engaged by the concept. But we are also attempting this without it being geographically specific or based around an existing structure.
The hope, by using the blog format, is to see where debate may take us. Is Slow Making going to be an ethical point of debate, with its manifesto tweeked, or will it evolve into an organisation that may eventually hold exhibitions or shows; become engaged in art & design education; find and promote ethical producers of materials?
To open this process up as much as possible, we're going to experiment with using guest posts here on the blog. If you have an idea, opinion or article of interest, please send it to:

slowmaking@gmail.com

either as an attachment or in the body of the email, & we will post it on the blog. Please bear in mind that this is being done in those moments of not doing something else (so much for slow living), and it may take a couple of days for it to appear on the blog. We will also cut things too long, & edit and repair if necessary. However we won't post items that require too much remedial editing, and of course will reject anything pornographic, bigoted or just plain stupid.

So please start contributing - & we look forward to reading your next post.

Book List Anyone?

2006-09-29T17:03:00.000+10:00

To give some idea of the likely breadth of something like Slow Making, the books below would all contribute something to an evolving philosophy. They are listed in no particular order, and may not necessarily be currently in print. Reading lists also have a useful role as regards your local municipal library. Our libraries are extremely important in building a community of knowledge, and by regularly borrowing and requesting books like these, it ensures that this knowledge is in circulation for all, not just those who can afford to buy books or have internet access.

Slow Living - Parkins & Craig - UNSW Press 2006
Natural Capitalism - Hawken/Lovins & Lovins - Earthscan 2002
What is a Designer - Potter - Hyphen Press 2002
The Unknown Craftsman - Yanagi - Kodansha 1989
In Praise of Slow - Honore - Orion 2005
The Culture of Craft - Dormer - University of Manchester Press 1997
The Nature & Art of Workmanship - Pye - Herbert 1995
Slow Food Revolution - Petrini & Padovani - Rizzoli 2006 - JUST RELEASED
Massive Change - Mau & Institute without Boundaries - Phaidon 2004
The Total Beauty of Sustainable Products - Datschefski - RotoVision 2001
Sustainable by Design - Walker - Earthscan 2006
Anni Albers:Selected Writings on Design - Danilowitz - Wesleyan University Press 2000
Thinking With Type - Lupton - Princeton Architectural Press 2004
On Beauty & Being Just - Scarry -Duckworth 2000
Charles & Ray Eames - Kirkham - MIT Press 1998
The Crafts in Britain in the Twentieth Century - Harrod - Yale University Press 1999
Affluenza:When Too Much is Never Enough - Hamilton - Allen & Unwin
Growth Fetish - Hamilton - Allen & Unwin
Lost Japan - Kerr - Lonely Planet 1999
Patterns of Culture - Benedict - Houghton Mifflin 1989
Papermaking - Hunter - Dover Books 1974
Pioneers of Modern Craft - Coatts - Manchester University Press 1997
Wood Engraving - Brett - Silent Books 1994
The Art of the Maker - Dormer - Thames & Hudson 1994
Small is Beautiful - Schumacher - Vintage 1973

Slow Making Manifesto

2006-09-28T18:02:00.000+10:00

Welcome to the first post of many on the Slow Making blog. I'm sure you're familiar with the Slow Food movement that began in Italy in 1989 (www.slowfood.com) & its numerous offspring over the last 15 years, of which Slow Making is just the latest.

There is no connection with Slow Food or Slow Living at this stage - merely a shared recognition that whether it is our food, or lives or work, we have to stop and reconsider the consequences of our current patterns of social, economic and political organisation.

What is Slow Making? Its not a nostalgic return to some bucolic fantasy, but a philosophy that wants to discuss placing the maker, the artist, the designer in an ethical context. An ethical context that respects the speed of the hand in making, that understands the unique tempo of crafted production, knows too that its materials have been sourced by sustainable means and respecting of the communities where it came from. An ethical context that also encompasses ethical business practices. A philosophy that engages with the longevity of an object, & how it can be maintained and repaired over generations. A philosophy that values appropriate excellence - objects, art and design that fits within the social and economic context of its end user.

Below is the first draft of the Slow Making Manifesto. It's aiming to be as simple and as clear about the philosophy of Slow Making as it can be. Whether it evolves into something like an organisation with paid up membership is entirely up for discussion, & so the manifesto is about principle, not process.

Slow Making Manifesto

1.To strive for appropriate excellence in the making process

2. To make objects that enhance the life of the user

3. To know the origins of our materials, ensuring that they respect country; the communities who produced or harvested them and are from sustainable sources

4. To make objects that will last, can be easily repaired when necessary and are made using materials and processes that do not harm the makers, the community or the environment

5. To deal with our co-workers, clients, suppliers and sellers in an ethical and fair manner

6. To foster, utilise and pass on skills that enhance the making process

7. To enjoy and relish the way of slow making

As makers, artists, designers and craftworkers, we all recognise the difficulty of surviving in a world geared to mass consumption, mass manufacture and mass obsolesence. Slow Food has been about not just describing and demanding change to the way that food is produced, but just as important, it has worked very very hard at educating people about the importance, the difference between Slow Food and mass food. Can Slow Making be used to do a similar thing? To educate an audience about materials, aesthetics, skill and beauty. And the possibility of making your living ethically .