Make it slow....

This piece was posted in January to another blog I write, largely about my making practice, but I intended to post it here; once I found the login and password for things semi-abandoned on the net. But nevertheless, slow making and the manifesto we laid out in 2006 are just as relevant and thankfully still present within our own practices.

But in the eight years since we set this blog up, social media has come to dominate as the main avenue for communications, Pinterest offers the craft or art worker a personalised visual diary, Evernote and its variations act as digital notetaker, and Tumblr has come to the fore as the arts blogging medium. A new craft movement has been in progress for some years, with a quirky focus on craft as amateur practice, combined with liberal doses of hipster irony and mid century revivalism. This piece is not a general statement about slow making so much as a musing on the state of contemporary making and the impact of curatorial support or otherwise. But I hope it might illuminate a very small corner of the making process - the need for time to contemplate, to make mistakes, to make many mistakes and the need for time to play.

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My more cynical friends might be tempted to point out the slow making doesn't begin to do justice to quite how slow my making is. But a fellow Art School survivor who was over for dinner made the point that whilst making five pieces in two weeks for an exhibition might seem crazyfast, it was only possible because of months, nay years, of thinking, contemplation, faffing, drafting, playing and more faffing.

And she's absolutely right.

 The other key thing about slow making is that it allows within certain types of craft practice the ability to respond in the moment to materials, to unexpected arrangements, to revealed glimpses of beauty or oddness; any of which might require plans to be changed, pieces rethought, things remade.

I won't be in the UK to see the exhibition Make it Slow but I would love to compare it to The Crafts Council's touring exhibition Raw Craft. As someone whose knowledge of craft were initially forged by the craft revival of the late 1960s and 1970s (1) and then matured in the 1990s, I am a bit underwhelmed by a lot of the work in Raw Craft as it suffers from the problem that a lot of contemporary design seems to also suffer from - being derivative and not (according to my world view) saying anything particularly interesting or important.

 I tripped over Make it Slow on the Crafts Council UK news page, after reading a post by Rosy Greenlees where she makes the oft-made point that tough times suit innovation. Perhaps, but the degree of impact that this new moment might have on over-consumption of the badly made and poorly designed that plagues us is not likely to be great - Greenlees' keenness reminds me of Sennett's recent work on skill and craftmanship which I found very very annoying. My main gripe was that as far as I could tell, Sennett had no real idea of what making actually entails, how it feels and has no experience of what Pye called the craftmanship of risk.

 A lot of the skills I've collected over the years are to varying degrees redundant. But none more so than french polishing. In the 1990s I did a trade certificate in a trade that effectively no longer exists. I was lucky enough to be taught by polishers who were very highly skilled and able to do very technically accomplished work, including arcane polishing techniques such as acid and chalk pulls on a french polished surface. Apart from the skill(s) themselves, what that level of expertise also gives you is the ability to see. And see very differently - detail, nuance, and errors become glaring in your own work and other peoples. How important that training, that re-seeing is, was reinforced by my time at the Woodworkshop, Canberra School of Art under George Ingram.

What I find disconcerting is how often I look at new work, and see hesitancy, haste, poor understanding of the materials, and an object that is first and foremost an intellectual exercise, a theoretical response to the notion of furniture or object or a cultural moment. I vacillate between feeling disappointed and seeming a very bad tempered harpie. However it is the curated applause that boosts such work that disappoints me far more. All work should be experimental; a challenge to your skills and design ideas which carries a high risk of something not quite working. Much that is applauded probably doesn't deserve such praise; the modern madness of praising when none is due; an act that anoints the expert and removes the rest of us from the critical field.

 I find that a lot of the opinion, criticism or theorising about craft seems to be written by people who demonstrate that they have little understanding of the making process, no grasp of the craftmanship of risk and lack the eye of the maker, but instead construct theoretical structures where the work is slotted into some spiderweb of cultural theory.

But in the next breath, I can also be critical of work that is too slick, lacking any sense of the maker, or work that relies on the material's pattern, colours or assumed value. Somewhere there is a space that I try to exist within - where slowness balances the need to work the material, push the tools at the pace of confident risk, where consideration and contemplation open possibilities that deadlines, surety and theory take away.

Notes
1. I had something of a charmed childhood as my mother ran a craft gallery during my primary school years. My weekends and school holidays were often sent in makers' studios as Daph dragged my father and I around Tasmania on her buying and object collecting trips which often included Craft Council meetings, or workshops blessed with all of the earnest adult certainty of the post-Chicago craft revival.

Where does your timber come from?

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

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.