The rising importance of artists books has gradually filtered into the contemporary art scene with many venues exhibiting these wonderful productions and collaborations between writers, artists and printers. This month at the State Library of Queensland sees a new collaboration for artist Euan Macleod and his long-time printer Ron McBurnie on an inspiring large scale artist book called Hearsay. As part of a talk entitled ‘The Trouble with artist’s books’ visitors have the opportunity to meet the creators of Hearsay which is based off an imagined chant by the writer Lloyd Jones who provided the literary inspiration.
Lloyd Jones says of the collaboration “Printmaking is a dirty and exacting exercise. It involves a lot of scratching and rubbing out. I discovered as much during a few days spent at Ron McBurnie’s studio in Townsville. Much of the scratching was employed to make my words disappear or to knock them back to a deeper layer in Macleod’s images. What had been a coherent chant, solid and with a life of its own, was now in fragments or else half-buried and in some instances, had vanished. The chant had served its purpose as a reference point and as such absorbed into the final work.”
The monotone white ground etchings of Macleod were produced as a response to the writer’s fascination to a story he was told at the Ubud writer’s festival where he was told about the mass suicides in the Balinese royal houses prompted by the arrival of the Dutch ships on the Horizon. “Seeing the end of the world as they had known it had apparently driven hundreds of people to walk en mass into the sea, and drown.”
The initial collaboration was facilitated by Jenny Neligan, director of Bowen Galleries, Wellington and was a totally collaborative effort between writer, artist and printmaker who worked on each facet of the project together. Macleod’s final images in the collaborative effort with McBurnie linger on as an echo of these imagined chants. In some places some words or broken phrases break the surface of the pictures where McBurnie was left to turn these elements into a large-scale handsome foldable book which will be on display at the library. This handmade art book has been printed in a limited edition of 10.
Hearsay: Book Launch and Artist Talk
4 May, 2013, 2-4pm
State Library of Queensland
Books are available from Watters Gallery, Sydney
www.wattersgallery.com
