About Me

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Sydney, NSW, Australia
I'm an arts management worker/ artist/ designer. I work at Accessible Arts in administration and bookkeeping, but also work on various freelance activities from photography to graphic design. I'm Associate Partner at the ARI, the Big Fag Press, board member of Runway Australian Experimental Art and occasionally work at Bailey and Yang Consultants. My creative work has often been driven by social issues and commentary. This blog started as a way of documenting research for my honours year at uni, which I have continued, in order to gather inspiration for future artistic practice.

Thursday, January 30, 2014

Yeomans Exhibition and Field Trip

I posted previously about working on a project for Ian Milliss and Lucas Ihlein called the Yeomans Project, which has just finished exhibiting at the Art Gallery of NSW. I went there on Monday and finally got some decent photos of the exhibition just before it closed. I also went on a field trip to one of Yeomans' original farms organised as part of the public programs. Here are some of my photos from both:

















I'm also working on transcribing the talks by Kirsten Bradley, Joanna Mendelssohn, Stuart Hill and Wendy Yeomans from the public programs. These will eventually be up on the Yeomans Project blog.

Monday, January 27, 2014

4 tonne tango!

We had our big moving day from Woolloomooloo to Glebe on Tuesday! The following photos give a pretty good idea of what that entailed.











And a quick montage I made of the day:


It'll probably be a month or so until we're settled into our new home. There's some brilliant old stories about the Glebe viaducts. It's lucky I don't believe in ghosts!

*All photos and footage are mine.

Thursday, January 2, 2014

The BIG FAG Dance

Big Fag Dance graphics designed by Pat Armstrong
A while ago we were told by Firstdraft that unfortunately we cannot stay at their depot in Woolloomooloo (which is this strange shaped building here):
Photo by Pat Armstrong
It was really sad for us because we have so many wonderful relationships in the area with Firstdraft, Artspace, The Cross Art Projects and many others.

However, we applied for and were successful in getting a City of Sydney Accommodation Grant! This is a really fantastic opportunity for us. So, our new home is in the Glebe Viaducts in Jubilee Park:

Photo from Google Images
Unfortunately, to get our 4 tonne machine there is tricky, and expensive! So in December we launched a campaign on Pozible to raise money.

I came up with the idea for Zoe Sadokierski to produce a print which looks at the history of printing presses. She decided to focus on the FAG family of presses.

Here is her beautiful limited edition print:

Big Fag Dance, 2013, Zoe Sadokierski
She also did some other drawings for us, which we printed onto small cards at our good friends the Rizzeria.

Dance Cards by Zoe Sadokierski, printed on The Rizzeria
We also made this brilliantly embarrassing video:


Big Fag Press » Big Fag Dance from Big Fag Press on Vimeo.

..and sent out some press releases which landed us a few shout outs like Art Almanac.

We also had some fabulous Big Fag Tshirts, aprons and little badges, and after 18 days of dancing, we had doubled our goal of $3000 to raise a total of $6297!


It was then clearly time to ACTUALLY DANCE!

So we organised a great 70s themed party with local DJs and lots of great food and beer. Alex Stevenson and I even got outed by Two Thousand!

I even made a cake. Here are Lucas & I with my cake:


A close up of my cake: (Yes I have cake making problems)


Now all we have to do is actually move the press this January!

The Yeomans Project - Art Gallery of NSW

In 2011, I started working on printing a series of works by Lucas Ihlein and Ian Milliss for the Yeomans Project on the Big Fag Press which was to be exhibited at ACCA in Melbourne. You can see I wrote a post about it in my blog here. The prints went on to win the 2012 Fremantle Arts Centre Print Award.

Here is Lucas holding up one of the prints:


In the lead up to another Yeomans exhibition, this time at the Art Gallery of NSW, Lucas Ihlein and Ian Milliss asked me to assist them in some of the legwork for the show, mainly making up some posters, and designing a newspaper based on their research blog.

The Yeomans Project recognises the work of PA Yeomans, an Australian inventor who came up with what's known as the Keyline concepts in agriculture and farming. The AGNSW exhibition is interestingly retrospective, as a similar proposal for an exhibition was rejected in the 70s when the trustees felt that such work was not art. Just goes to show how the meaning of art has changed in the last 40 years!

The posters I designed were based on websites of other artists or artist groups who use agriculture, farming or food as the basis of their art practice: (f)route, Artist as Family, Milkwood Permaculture and Diego Bonetto (who is also a partner of the Big Fag Press).

An interesting off-topic note: When I did my short course on social media business marketing at Media School, (who have no particular association with art or agriculture), Milkwood Permaculture were their prime example of awesome social media marketing. Small world, huh?

Anyway, for the posters, I had to request high resolution images and names of fonts, and loosely put together information about each artists' practice in one poster for the exhibition. Here are some of my proof prints stuck to my hallway wall! (yes they look better in the art gallery).


And here are the posters in the gallery (and Diego next to his one). I keep meaning to get back to the AGNSW and take some better photos of the whole exhibition but I haven't had time! If you wanted to see some of Lucas' photos of the launch, they are here.


The University of Wollongong (where Lucas teaches Media & Arts) funded the production of a newspaper for the exhibition which was based on the Yeomans Project blog.

It was a great experience getting it printed at MPD in Alexandria. At the Big Fag we print one hand fed sheet at a time, one colour at a time, about 100 imprints a day, not to mention an hour of cleaning up. I've explained our process in more detail in this post from ages ago. For this newspaper, MPD were using their web press machine. Now, the big fag is big, but, this is a BIG machine:


These are the rolls of paper they use to feed through the machine:


And here are the first proofs I had to look at to see if the colours were all right. (This took a bit of time).


Then see all these knobs here? Apparently they change the balance of the ink somehow. So for example, when I said a page was looking too yellow, they could fix it for the next proofing.


Here is my contact at MPD, Eleanor holding up one of the plates they use in the machine. They don't look too much different to our Big Fag plates! And on the right is the big roll of paper being fed into the machine.


So, the Big Fag does about 100 imprints of one giant page a day, and that's just one colour... this web press machine does 15,000 copies of a full colour newspaper in 1 hour! Here are some videos of the newspaper being printed:



Amazing! I would love to know more about how the web press machine works, I think it's fascinating.

So, all this was great fun but a harrowing few weeks designing the posters and newspaper during the time I was working at Sculpture by the Sea. I'm really proud of the way it all looks though!

 Art Gallery of NSW advertising for the Yeomans Project

The AGNSW exhibition is on in the Contemporary Project Space until 27 January 2014. The newspapers are free at the exhibition, so please pick one up!


*All photos and videos are mine, unless captioned otherwise.