I’ve been at Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, New York, a few weeks now. I’m here on a Artist’s Book Residency. Also with support from the Ian Potter Foundation and a successful crowd sourcing experiment.

Not knowing what it was going to be like here I imagined myself being in a separatist book cult for 2 months judging by the simple facts that; no men were allowed, it was in upstate New York and the scrapbook-y aesthetic of their website. It is not quite like that and I have been more than pleasantly suprised. The surrounds remind me of an American Summer Camp movie (hopefully not Creep Show) with lots of squirrels and chipmunks. I have felt quite deceived by my fauna education through cartoons when I realised how tiny chipmunks actually are – my only previous gauge of scale was Alvin, Simon and Theodore. Besides the abundance of them I have seen a Woodpecker (again, a misjudgment of scale much bigger than you imagine Woody to be), newts (bright orange salamander like creatures), heaps of giant bumblebees, frogs and snakes – that still make me jump as I’m so used to them being poisonous. There’s also a groundhog who’s about but I keep missing him and the other night we were swooped by a bat in the studio. I have also realised that the reason all the kids in the camp movies wear long socks is that there is poison ivy and ticks everywhere. I guess you could compare it to our snakes and spiders? This is me in a patch of poison ivy…

The forest behind the studio

Anyways so besides the regular lake swims and wonders of nature there are many print wonders that happen within the 4 storeys of the ex-post office that is WSW.  WSW was set up in 1974 by four amazing women- Tana, Anne, Anita and Babs who are incredibly all still involved – Anne and Tana on a daily basis in the office and studios and Anita who wrote the first grant in the 70s still writes the grant applications. The studios are amazing, quite DIY and everything has it’s own little quirks and charm – plus the work they produce here is super high quality. They have an amazing archive of artist’s books and all quite different – one of the things I really love is the fact that all the books are so different – it’s not like some studios which you really see the mark of the studio all over the work. WSW are also the largest publisher of Artist’s Books in the US.

(Above: Intern Anna sets some text on the Vandercook Letterpress)

I have been working in the screen printing studio with my new friend Tyanna Buie. She’s doing the Studio Residency program and printing an extremely huge work in large sections tiled together as a wall piece. It makes my head explode looking at it and trying to understand how she knows how it fits together. She’s probably the most un-printmaker type printer I’ve met- she’s often gets on the floor and prints on her hands and knees and uses thick Stonehenge heavy duty paper so she can add hundreds of layers to it. This is her just beginning…

 

The book I am working on has a song poem record soundtrack. The format is inspired by Little Golden Books – as I loved those as a kid but is more a ‘singing book’ than a ‘talking book’. I had the tracks done by Magic Key, a song poem company and they perfectly give the stories quite an extra absurd level. The stories in the book are all from around Redfern and my place in Sydney, mostly about Lucas as he says/does the funniest things pretty much constantly. He pretty much is my book muse. Anyway I got my test pressings about a week ago so I should be getting my 7inch soon. So I have about another week of printing, then it’s a few weeks of binding it all together…