Strange pages: Investigating artists' books with Dr Caren Florance

Nicki Mackay-Sim: I think that's my cue. Well, good afternoon and welcome to the National Library of Australia. I'm Nicki Mackay-Sim, Director of Curatorial and Collection Research section here at the National Library. I'd like to begin by acknowledging Australia's First Nations peoples as the traditional owners and custodians of this land. And give my respect to the Elders, past and present, and through them to all Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Thank you for attending this event this evening, coming to you from Ngunnawal and Ngambri country, on this beautiful spring day. This evening's presentation, Strange Pages, investigating artists' books, will be delivered by Dr Caren Florance, an honorary 2024 National Library of Australia Fellow. The Library's Fellowship program supports researchers to make intensive use of the National Library's rich collections through residencies of 12 weeks, and they are made possible by generous philanthropic support.

Dr Caren Florance is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Canberra's Centre for Creative and Cultural Research. She's also a maker of artist books, often in collaboration with other artists and writers. In her presentation today, Caren will reveal how the National Library's broad and vibrant collection of artists' books came to be. Beginning with those made by the Canberra School of Arts Graphic Investigation Workshop. Please join me in welcoming Dr Caren Florance.

Dr Caren Florance: Thank you Nicki. And hello, this is like a episode of 'This Is Your Life'. Very pleased to see you all. Okay. Firstly, I would also like to acknowledge the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples, the traditional custodians of the land on which this Library stands. And pay respect to their elders, past, present, and future. I also gratefully acknowledge the peoples and elders of the Yuin Nations upon whose lands I live and work. I extend this respect to any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people here today.

I'm telling you stories tonight about Strange Pages. For those of you who already know about artists' books, most of what I show you probably won't seem overly strange, but that's thanks to the active growth of artist book culture, and the institutional support that has developed since the early 1990s. I applied for this Fellowship to delve into the relationship between the National Library of Australia and the Canberra School of Arts Graphic Investigation Workshop. Which, or as I will call it, and from long habit interchangeably, the GIW or Graphics.

And also to think about the way some of its artists' books have slipped through the cracks, because they were strange before their time. I've spent my time fossicking, looking sideways, going down dead ends, and stumbling onto things that made me dance a little bit. I've interviewed many people connected to this project, and I've uncovered so many interesting stories, that it's been difficult to decide which ones to tell today. And with such limited time to talk, I've had to keep things simple. So if you are a GIW person watching this, and I don't tell your story, I apologise in advance.

I will write an expanded version of this research, and if you haven't shared your graphic story with me yet, I encourage you to get in touch.

Tonight I'm taking you back to the first half of the 1980s, when Canberra was essentially a small country town with a great music scene. And the Australian alternative book scene was clearly divided between conceptual books that were commercially printed or photocopied, and fine press books produced using luxury papers, handset letterpress, and bespoke image production.

The National Library has an excellent collection of fine press books, and most of their conceptual books in the collection were those that included an ISBN, and were obliged to lodge a legal deposit copy. Sidebar, this image is from a fine press book, produced by GIW lecturer Christopher Croft who, like many artists of the time, had to deposit a copy to the NLA because he included an ISBN, which was a relatively new system at the time. He lodged a copy from his main edition, which have uncolored prints. It lives in the general collection, and I love the thought of people borrowing something that they thought would be a non-fiction guide to local animals and were instead given this beautiful, luxurious production to hold in their hands. Which has uncut pages at the top, and it hides the scientific names of the mostly real animals within their undersides of the page. And you can just see where that little line hits up to the bottom right-hand corner, which is where the scientific name sits. Happily, the Library also produced one of his very limited hand colour copies for their special collections.

So the GIW student artists' books I've been looking at in my fellowship, often had similarities to both of those production genres, commercial and fine press, but were much more adventurous. On the most part, what the students made was something quite new for Australia, and consequently, the ones collected here got lost in the Library's cataloguing system. If you do an NLA catalogue search for 'artist books', many of the books I show you will not appear in your results, yet.

Now, some of you might be wondering what I mean by the term artist books. Quite simply, an artist book is a book made by an artist. There is a wide spectrum of them, from high-end art to leaf productions and commercially printed paperbacks, through to small editions of handmade books, using many different production processes, and then two unusually shaped unique book objects, with many other varieties in-between. It's quite a contested field, with the definitions depending on things like who is defining the work, if you're a maker or a collector, what the audience is, or what an institution wants to collect.

And actually when I say made by an artist, it's actually likely that more than one person has been involved in the production of the book, working either in the background, in a technical sense, or openly as a contributor or collaborator.

And this is a good point to bring us back to the GIW, which was designed as a collaborative workshop from the start. It was established in 1978 when the very basic existing Canberra School of Art, essentially a technical college, was given a huge reboot, and was remodelled into workshop spiked new director, German printmaker Udo Sellbach, who based his decisions on Bauhaus principles.

The GIW was ostensibly a drawing workshop, but its definition of drawing was extremely broad, more akin to a philosophical approach to interpretation and reaction, and often manifested spatially as sculpture, land art, performance, and of course, books. And its first overarching Head of Workshop hired by Sellbach in 1979 was Czech artist Petr Herel, who had moved here from Paris with his Australian wife Dorothy, to avoid being forced to return to Communist Czechoslovakia.

Over its time, the graphic investigation workshop collaborated with staff from around the school, local artists, and invited visiting artists from around Australia and overseas. There were only two full-time staff members at any time, with a wide range of part-time and sessional staff, who ensured a vital mix of interests and abilities. The collaborative pedagogy of the GIW had a number of iterations. Teachers and students working side-by-side on a project, visiting artists working with staff and including students, and students working together. All usually bound by a theme arising from a text, or using text directly. Image-making techniques other than the core uses of drawing, papermaking and basic printmaking were taught only when they matched the project, contingent upon the skill sets of whoever was working in the workshop that semester. The visiting artists were a mixture of printmakers, graphic artists, typographers, papermakers, writers and book artists.

Many of the books produced and nearly all of Petr's own books were made in the European tradition of unbound, loose covered books, sometimes housed in bespoke boxes, and using printmaking processes. But a large number of books thanks to the variety of staff and visitor skills, were playful, sculptural, and highly experimental.

I pitched this project to the Library, because I wanted to unpack an event that I'd heard of for years. A small exhibition that generated a collecting relationship between the GIW and the NLA, and sparked interest in the artist book as we know it now. Petr Herel told me the story a few times over the years because he found it amusing, and of course the last few months have revealed that the story is not as simple as it sounds.

So November, 1984 saw the Canberra School of Art host the first National Conference of Craft Bookbinders, ambitiously organised by the newly formed Canberra Craft Bookbinding Guild, some of whom worked at the NLA as librarians, or in the conservation section. And I'd like to welcome those of you here today.

The conference was timed to coordinate with a travelling International Craft Bookbinding exhibition installed at the National Library. It was a huge undertaking and well attended. There are two reasons why Herel and his students and collaborators grabbed the National Library's attention at this time. The first is that the travelling exhibition was organised by the Australian Crafts Council, and they had advertised for Australian content to be included, to supplement the international works.

Happily, Petr, who had a wicked sense of humour, had one ready to go, a collaboration with one of his core staff members, the late great papermaker Gaynor Cardew, who had an even more wicked sense of humour, and her friend, master bookbinder, Helen Wadlington.

It was a beautiful book work called 'Stigmata'. Exquisitely Constructed, 'Stigmata' was essentially an Iron Maiden book, a stitched book block of handmade red-hot poker paper, punched through with a grid of holes that allowed the book to be snugly impaled by a corresponding grid of nails within its removable tri-fold hard case. There were no images, no text within the book. The title said it all. And so does the droll line at the end of the catalogue statement. "This concept provided a new experience for the binder." This offering was accepted by the exhibition organisers, but with the proviso, it had to be clearly marked as something strange, as you can see by the catalogue entry. And the Library according to Petr, exhibited it behind a sort of curtain, maybe to offer people a choice as to whether they wanted to see something so strange. I'm not sure if it was only shown in Canberra or whether it travelled with the exhibition to other venues, but it made it into the catalogue. It isn't in the National Library's collection, nor in any other public collection, it would be wonderful to find it.

The second event was during the conference itself with such a ready-made book-focused audience at this doorstep, Petr Herel and his staff Gaynor Cardew and Christopher Croft, decided to put together their first workshop exhibition. A casual showcase of what their students had been doing with books. And mind you, this was only four years of making books.

They laid out the works on paper-covered tables in the biggest workshop space, and made a catalogue. A simple set of loose-folded photocopies inside a bespoke handmade paper cover, tied together with cotton library tape. The 29 books had all been made within that first four years of the workshop's existence, and were a wide variety of sizes, shapes, and materials. From the stab-bound book by Wendy Mucha that you've seen for the promotional image for this talk, to Russell Way's, 'Vicious Triangle'. A unique book of handmade paper held in a cage of twigs, and you can see it down there in the middle bottom.

The students were present in the room as the attendees visited the display, just working on in the background, on their own projects. Herel's hand-typed postscript talked of the development of the book as an art form, providing a broad field for artistic expression. Which evolved from the need to summarise the wide range of expressions used in workshop practise. And from a deliberate intention to explore an alternative space not traditionally used in other areas of visual art.

Petr described the event in more detail to me in a 2014 letter, with a distinct tone of amusement, saying that they didn't set out to deliberately provoke, but that they knew there would be some confusion from the more formal binders and Library attendees. It was not long after the conference that he was called over to the National Library for a closed-door meeting with some of the staff. And it seems that he acquitted himself well when grilled, and I quote, "About his intentions towards the book" because the National Library soon afterwards issued a press release, announcing the donation of six GIW artists' books to the Library's collection.

So I'm going to walk you through the six books listed on that press release, all of which were in that first exhibition. And no, I don't know why the date was changed on the press release, perhaps to move it to a slow news day. I'm going to share them in chronological order. Mike Van Veen 'Song of the Earth Spirit', 1980. According to Herel and the GIW official records, this was the very first student artist book made in the workshop, made in the style that Petr was used to: unbound, neat folded cover, showcasing luminous inked slate prints with what looks like touches of bright pastel chalk. The text is printed with letterpress, and at this point and pretty much any letterpress printed by the GIW until 1985, was done during the printing facilities at the Canberra TAFE, guided by master printer, Peter Finlay. Finlay continued to work with the workshop for a long time after they got their own letterpress equipment. And fun fact, the publishing entities Finlay Press and Finlay Lloyd are named in his honour.

Philippa Hofgartner, Friedrich Nietzsche's 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra', in 1982. This is a large box set of unbound folded sheets, printed with Nietzsche quotes, in letterpress with gorgeous velvety black equating etchings. The first entire folded section, which makes four pages, is blank, which is very common in GIW books. Students were taught not to be scared of blank space, to give an idea room to breathe, and it is a very European feature, along with the pages being unnumbered which often results in the pages becoming jumbled. Every artist book has its own rhythm, which forms the book structure.

Here we have on each section a paragraph of text by Nietzsche floating on the outside front page, a second paragraph on the inner left page, and an image on the right with the fourth page blank, repeat, repeat. The thick creamy paper is like a soft felt to the touch, which makes handling the book a luxurious pleasure. This is a great example regarding the GIW's attitudes towards text and image relationships. While this may seem like straight book illustration, it isn't. The chunks of text were chosen as inspiration for the images. Part of the tradition Herel was importing, was the notion of making artist books that are responsive to literature, and illustrative without being illustrations. That's not to say that students didn't make conventional illustrated books. In fact, they were actively encouraged to enter the Japanese Noma Concours for picture book illustration, which ran until 2008, and a number of students did, sometimes winning commendations.

Elizabeth Jackson's 'Braille Book', 1983. This catalogue entry must have been taken, or this title must have been taken directly from that GIW exhibition catalogue. No translation of the text accompanied the book. It's completely in braille with gorgeously, tactile, blind-embossed etchings. She made two braille books as a student, one called 'Precipitations', and the other called 'The Path', and they seem to have been constantly confused with each other, in GIW records.

Elizabeth lives in Canberra, so I interviewed her during my fellowship, which helped clarify things, like the fact that her creative practise has actually been under her everyday name, Buffy Jackson, when I'd been looking for her as Elizabeth. Buffy was a mature-age student when she joined the GIW and was interested in special needs education. I didn't know this, but most braille books are plastic, so she was interested in producing some that were actually truly tactile. She'd collaborated with a braille typist to make the books. We initially had to wait to talk to each other, because she was going on an art course that was held in a gorge in Central Australia.

When we did talk, she confessed she'd lost the original script and couldn't remember it. So I decided to translate it. It took me a few goes because there's lots of versions of braille, but eventually I could confirm that the NLA copy is indeed 'Precipitations'. And here is the text on this particular page spread. "The gorge conspires, but its deep scouring, lets in the sky." We thought it was pretty amazing that she'd just been on a trip to a gorge and suddenly we discovered she was writing about one 40 years ago.

Paul Uhlmann's 'Jack a Bee', 1983. Paul Uhlmann was one of the first intake of graphics students, and one of the few to come straight from school. He's also the only person to be a postgraduate GIW student, and taught in the workshop while he undertook his MA. This first book, 'Jack a Bee', is a bold creation. It uses enormous sheets of very expensive paper, living masses of space around often very small prints with only one sheet of text, apart from the simple title and the colophon. The inclusion of a colophon page is a feature shared with fine press books. It's the page that gives the production details, and graphic students were encouraged to include these, but they didn't always include the details you want. It's no wonder that the Library placed 'Jack a Bee' into the pictures section rather than as a book, because it presents as a folio of prints. Fun fact, the catalogue also lists it as a work about bees, despite there being no mention of bees other than within the title.

Brett Hatherly, 'Tests', 1984. The press release says 1984, despite the book's colophon saying that it was made in 1983. This production method is Xerox prints. This is an excellent moment to remind people that photocopy books were the most common production method of artist books in the '70s and '80s. And if you look at Gary Catalano's, 1983, 'The Bandaged Image', the first critical book published about Australian artist books, nearly everything in it was either offset printed or photocopied.

That's why the GIW output was so unusual. It tried a playful investigative line between genres, and wasn't afraid to ignore the rules, but didn't discourage students from riding the zeitgeist. Also, and even more importantly, Petr Herel loved his photocopier. It lasted for ages that machine, it printed one colour at a time, and had at least three separate colour drums, black, blue, and brown, that he would swap around to create various effects, and he encouraged the students to experiment with it too. The toner was rich and velvety and above all, strong and stable. Everything made using that photocopier still looks like it was printed yesterday. We were still using it in the edition and artist book studio well into the 2000s, and I would give my right pinky to have one like it now.

So this is Brett's photocopy collage book. It plays with the politics of his time and sadly, many of its pages are still very relevant, especially the Middle Eastern pages, which could have been made today, or tomorrow. I couldn't resist this page though with the King's visit this week, is Charles and Diana, saying, "I wish they would leave us alone." Brett is a graphic designer these days and he still predominantly works with photo mash-ups in a digital collage style, building outwards from his student work. You would've seen some of his work if you visited the War Memorial over the past decade.

Wendy Muche's 'Meatshop' was freshly made in the year of the press release, 1984. Raw expressionistic woodcuts printed onto washy, wrapped around fibrous layers of handmade paper, and stab bound. Every element of it exuding strength and passion. A friend recently showed me another of Wendy's prints that she's had on her wall for years, and I'd walked past it many times without noticing, but it has the same energy.

Handmade paper was a feature of the workshop, because Canberra happened to have Gaynor Cardew in town, with her personal studio at the now long-gone Old Canberra Brickworks where bookbinder Helen Wadlington worked too. And Gaynor was happy to take students to the studio, or cart tubs of fresh paper pulp to the GIW. She was an excellent drawing teacher, and had a very active cartooning career, which ranged from community and government publications to regular gigs in newspapers like ''The Canberra Times, 'Matilda' and the 'Cane Toad Times'. She trained up a whole generation of Canberra papermakers, one of the most active being Catherine Nix. And between them hat-tipped to Tasmanian paper maker Penny Carey Wells also, set up an active paper workshop within the art school, which lasted into the early 2000s. The paper pulp made by the students all wasn't always used for making sheets of paper for books. It ended up in all sorts of shapes and forms, often as large-scale installation works.

But wait, there's more. Of course, I had to trawl through the catalogue for all things connected to the Graphic Investigation Workshop, and for artist books. But when I started looking up the students by name, I found two more books and a print folio. All three arriving at the Library in one batch in early 1988. Which I think must have been a purchase from the 1987 School of Art graduation show. Probably by one of the National Library librarians keeping track of the workshop. By the time I found these, I'd become better versed in the Library's end processing practises, and something was nagging at me. The accession dates I was finding were all over the place, but let's first have a look at these lovelies.

Anne Jennings, 'Bitumen Birds', 1987. This is a beautiful work, a stack of single-sheet pages in two layers, a light Japanese washi sheet, with letterpress text overlaying airy dry-point etchings, printed on thick, fluffy hahnemuhle paper, using pastel-plate tones with additional pochoir shapes, which is colour, directly hand-applied through cut stencils. The letterpress is in Bodoni font, which gives the book a very French feel, and the wraparound cover has its hand-drawn title, lined embossed on the front.

Gregory Myers, 'Hope Against Hope', 1987. I'm 99% sure that when this book arrived at the Library, its unbound pages were in the wrong order. Not only was it placed in the pictorial section, but it had been titled according to its colophon page, which was at the front of the page stack when I opened the cover. So the official title in the catalogue is 'Dry Points and Etchings with Photocopied Text', whereas later in the stack, was a beautiful title page with the words, 'Hope Against Hope'. This is very much structured as a book with a chapter heading on the front of each page fold, and a collage text on the inside left, and a dry point etching on the right, evoking the landscapes of de Chirico in an ochre '80s content. The headings pull the text and images together, lust, passion, love, hope, hate, perversion, despair. Instead of letterpress, the book's text is printed using solvent released photocopy toner, which adds to the immediacy of the newspaper clipped word clouds. And when the colophon is returned to the end of the book, the three blank pages before it make perfect sense, giving space to process the savagery of Myers content.

The third work by Alan Tonge, also has a basic descriptor as its title, but maybe because this time there is no colophon. It absolutely does present as a folio of prints. But there's a dramatic flourish to its presentation, and a narrative bent to the series that made me want to approach it as a book, and I found myself sorting the prints into a different order each time I looked at it, to make stories. It's housed in a very large bespoke box with a small inset inside for the stack of prints. The prints themselves while all on the same size paper, vary in size and occasionally colour.

The name '12 Lithographs', seems to have come from the delivery docket, but it's actually the wrong print process. They are very definitely dry point etchings, enthusiastically scribed with a needle-pointed tool directly onto the plate, without any kind of regard for image reversal, and depict, I'm presuming just the one, an Elizabethan style vessel, from a variety of angles, and with a filmic panning around the scene. There are ropes carefully notated that you can see there on the screen, and a wonderful scene of sailors sitting along a mast boom, the only humans in the stack of images. On one print has text scrolled on it, and when I photographed it and reversed it, this is what I read, "Yesterday I felt so old. Yesterday come back, come to stay, without you," which are of course, lyrics by The Cure. And suddenly I was in the studio with him as he sang and scratched the plates. Which is actually the title attributed to the work and the GIW's own records, 'Boats'. Sorry, that was a bit of a segue, because I actually remembered that it was The Cure. Anyway...

Okay. Working together. This is one of the rarely mentioned secrets of making artist books. It helps to be proactive, to spruik your own work, and get to know the collectors, because there are very few other ways to disseminate your work in the Australian art world. The NLA started collecting Petr Herel's books because he dropped one into the Library in 1981, and a group of librarians got extremely interested. There weren't many, if any, books like his in Australia back then. He'd already had Australian arts media attention before his appointment to the school, which must have helped when they researched him.

He probably encouraged Paul Uhlmann to do the same thing, especially because his 'Jack a Bee' was already in the collection. So when Uhlmann returned to Canberra to be a postgraduate in the GIW after an invigorating study trip to Germany, he built a collecting relationship with the librarian, Richard Stone who had been one of the first people to support the collection of Petr Herel's works. Paul was keen, bringing his books across the lake to the Library almost as soon as the ink was dry. And no doubt they had many interesting conversations about the works, and the ideas behind them.

So consequently, he has his own catalogue collection suffix, U31. It's a lovely little group of books and includes one of my favourites, 'Finsternis', 1991. It's a gentle piece with a wax resist cover. He's printed the letter letterpress title, then applied wax in a cross shape, dyed it a deep black, and then removed the wax. And you can see that over here in the corner. It's very effective visually. Inside there are layers similar to 'Bitumen Birds'. Translucent papers with printed text, falling around dark atmospheric aquatints.

Another book that Paul gave to Richard is one part of a group book project that Paul led as the teacher, 'New Insecta', 1989. Group projects were common in the workshop. They usually involved a visiting artist or a theme, or concept that one of the regular staff wanted to try. Sometimes it would involve only a year group of students. Other times it might be a wider group. 'New Insecta' developed after Petr Herel told Paul Uhlmann about a controversial Belgian entomologist called A.A Girault, who worked in Queensland in the 1920s and '30s. He apparently made up his own facts to supplement his true findings, and presented them all as true. The project aim was to print three states of each printing plate, which means adding more marks and more layers, and printing each time you make the changes, rather than just printing the finished version. This progressive style of printing became a research interest of Paul's, and it remains a fascination for him, to this day.

The National Library has five complete GIW student group projects in their collection. A concrete poetry collection called 'Australia Poet', led by Melbourne architect and writer Alex Selenitsch from 1989. The incredibly long titled 'Orbis Sensualium Pictus or A World of Things Obvious to the Senses', drawn in Pictures', led by John Pratt in 1994. 'State of the Environment: Volume One', led by Dianne Fogwell, 1995. And 'Psalms', with visiting artists, Raphael [unclear] and Ulrike Sturm, in 1996.

But the one I want to show you is a reiteration of how much the photocopier was used and loved in the workshop. I cannot stress this enough. The box set of the group project 'Body Simulation' comes in two parts. The actual work, and the photocopied planning mock-up, which, since it has not only been included but had room allowed for it in the project cylinder box, is obviously a formal part of the project.

It's the perfect example of the GIW teaching process. A mock-up helps to work out the flow of the finished work, and plan around any technical issues. Students are given a brief to work with which outlines the theme, and includes the page size that they need to work with. Often there is letterpress to be factored in. Each person might set their name in type and help to print it, or not. Sometimes the technical officer would do all the basic text. There are always students who push the boundaries. In this folio, Mark Arnott had provided his own printed insert on a different paper stock. David Rowe turned the double page into a tri-fold by attaching another page, via a rough sewing machine, zigzagging red thread. And Lucy Turner worked with a right angle tri-fold that constructs a gorgeous atmospheric architectural space, using aquatint prints. And I would love to show them to you, but I needed permissions. The photocopy mock-up shows Petr Herel having fun, overlaying the various toner colours, and if a student didn't turn up with their own ideas to reproduce or insert, he just played with anything lying around the office. It's a very beautiful object, and like nothing else in the National Library.

Okay, that's all the beautiful things. Well, not all of them, but the things I have time to show you. So I'm going to get close to the finish by delving into some material clues about the books on the 1984 press release.

In this era of the NLA, different accession processes were done by dedicated teams, and the book cataloguing depended wholly on whose desk it landed upon, and they could make their own decision on which Dewey decimal numbers were applied. Was it a book about printmaking? If there were prints in it, then, yeah. But what kind of printmaking? It was totally arbitrary. And as I said at the start, none of these initial books have been catalogued as artist books, so they aren't counted in the National Library's Artist Book collection. Gary Catalano was using the term in 1983, but as I said earlier, mostly about photocopy and offset art books. In a Library context, there was no such thing as an artist book, until the early 1990s, when the scenes started ramping up around the country. Encouraged by innovative dealers like Noreen Graham. But you'd think someone might've tried to make one up.

The next team after cataloguing was end processing, which is the business of preparing a book for its destination, whether that was the stacks or pictorial, and to make sure that the object wasn't going to get stolen, by applying markings like [unclear], stamps and stickers. By the mid 1980s, barcode stickers had hit the desks, and in some cases were enthusiastically applied. Witness, poor old 'Thus Spake Zarathustra', whose every section has a barcode, often in the middle of a print area like this. There's the print, tthere's the sticker, upside down sticker. Didn't even look at what it was. Is anyone wincing?

The past, as they say, is a different country. I try and remind myself that this was a reaction to decades of Library theft, before the era of electronic dates and scanners. I found that every object in the Library has two dates. The date it was created, in the case of books is usually on the imprint page or colophon, and then the date that it was formally accessioned, or registered in the Library system. And most books accessioned before a certain date, that I've yet to work out, have this date written in pencil in the top right-hand corner of one of the pages. A small way into the book.

So those three works that arrived at the Library together, which is this docket here, have the same accession date, 23rd of 8th, '88. This isn't the day they arrived, it's the date they were processed, and put on a shelf. So it took me a while to realise this, and so when I went back to the original six, it was a bit of an epiphany. The press release turned out to be a kind of hat tip to the fact that these books were in the collection. Because unlike the 1988 group, they didn't arrive all at the same time. Perhaps this was part of the 1984 closed door meeting, Petr might've complained that the earlier books had not been acknowledged. From the pencilled accession dates, Mark Van Veen's book arrived in March, 1984. Now the press release was in December, 1984.

Brett Hatherly's 'Test', has a big purple date that you can see here, 22nd of September, 1983, on both sides of his inside flaps, that I thought he might've added himself as a sort of postmodern sliders. But no, they were whacked on by the Library and weirdly, I haven't seen them in any other books. And I've looked at a lot of books in the last three months. Philippa Hofgartner's books has no date markings, nor have Paul Gilman's or Wendy Muche's books. So I assume that they did arrive at the Library after the bookbinders conference and exhibition. Weirdly Buffy Jackson's 'Braille book' has an accession date of August, 1985. I presume this meant that it sat on someone's desk for a long time. Perhaps not surprising, if you can consider that it was braille and it had no text to know what it was about. And also the National Library caught fire in March, 1985, and that would've shaken things up for a while. Happily, none of the collection was really damaged. It was a big event though.

So a week ago or so, I look back on all the things I've hunted and gathered and realised that there aren't that many GIW things in the National Library. This was a bit of a revelation, but it makes sense. You see, very early on in his time as the head of the graphic investigation workshop, Petr Herel decided to start an archive of the workshop's output, in-house.

He made it mandatory that if the students editioned their work, they should leave a copy in the workshop archive. A lot of the time they left their unique objects in the archive as well. There are 386 book works documented in the GIW's three volume catalogue resume. And by the dissolution of the workshop in 1998, he and the other GIW staff, particularly Dianne Fogwell, had collected over 250 books and limited editions, that are now in the rare book section of the ANU Menzies Library. It was a solid vision and it's a truly remarkable collection.

In July, 1996, the National Library hosted the last leg of a large survey exhibition of GIW works called Fragile Objects, that had travelled to the U.S. and Switzerland and none of the works had been drawn from the National Library's collection.

Here's what I think as a conclusion. Petr Herel deposited a few student works here during the 1980s as exemplars, because he knew that the workshop was doing something extraordinary, something that was completely different, and the placing them in the National Library of Australia was an investment that just might pay off. Sometimes it was a sacrifice. Buffy Jackson's 'Precipitations' is only in the National Library, and not in the GIW archive. He was being prescient. The excellent institutional collections of contemporary artist books at, for example, the State Libraries of Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales didn't start until the early 1990s.

The unfortunate fact that these works have been pretty much lost in the system, is proof of their newness and unconformity. But if my work here can revive them as a pioneer collection of artist books, within Australia's library collections, representing something different and new for their era, then it's been a great fellowship, and I thank the National Library for it. Thank you.

Nicki Mackay-Sim: We do have time for questions. Because we're recording... Have we got... Yeah, we've got a bit of time. If you'd like to ask a question. We've got roaming mics here. Sharyn's got one up at the back here. I'll move out of the way.

Dr Caren Florance: You can share a story about Petr Herel, or the photocopier if you want? I know there's a few of you here.

Audience member 1: Hi, thanks. That was very interesting. I actually was in the Graphic Investigation Workshop. I didn't even realise this talk was going to be about it, it's fantastic. It's really, really nice to hear all that. But really, I'm just saying I hope that there's going to be an exhibition of some of these things. And is there anything in the pipeline for that?

Dr Caren Florance: There's nothing planned. I'm hoping, well, I don't know. I won't hold my breath, but I think it's probably time for something. There have been exhibitions over certain years, but usually quite small ones. We had a few at the art school when we had students that cared about that sort of thing. Yeah, it would be lovely to have another one. Yeah. Thank you. We got the. Who's going to get there first? Fran or Sharyn? Hang on, wait for the microphone. Sorry. There we go. There we go.

Audience member 1: This is just, I guess, a question about the paper making.

Dr Caren Florance: Yes.

Audience member 1: And it's been 40 years. How is the paper holding up in terms-

Dr Caren Florance: Really well.

Audience member 1: ... of conservation and-

Katherin Nix: May I answer that question?

Dr Caren Florance: Yes.

Audience member 1: Oh.

Dr Caren Florance: Katherine Nix, please. Can someone pass? Hang on, Katherine, stop. Katherine. Stop. Get a microphone.

Katherin Nix: At the Canberra School of Art with the Hollander Beta, and I have worked in paper for decades. I'll give you just one example of the sort of papers they made there. I've just come back from Queensland where I lived for 13 years. I came back to Canberra last year. On that deck up in Queensland, I had one of my vertical collages in plant-fibre paper and Gaynor introduced me to plant-fibre papers. And then we worked together for a long while and then I moved more into [unclear] paper. But those plant-fibre papers and the students would've made them. I made the particular artwork in 1982. It was 10 years hanging on the veranda in Queensland. The map was not so good, the frame was dilapidated. It was full of paper wasps nests. I cleaned it up, I've had it reframed, the paper is perfect.

Dr Caren Florance: Yeah. The Wendy Muche book, which is made of, I can't remember which kind of, it was on the slide, but it's pristine. And it's not just because of the Library, it's because the paper is just holding up. It's fantastic. Mmm. Yeah.

Anyone else feel brave? Go on. Yeah? Sorry. Shout out to the bookbinders, by the way. I looked at the ACT Heritage Library files for the bookbinding conference, and they were great.

Audience member 2: Caren, you mentioned that artists' books were very few if indeed any, before the late '70s in Australia? I wonder if you could expand on that a little? It seems to me rather surprising given the popularity of concrete poetry at around-

Dr Caren Florance: Well, it's contentious.

Audience member 2: ... in those earlier decades?

Dr Caren Florance: Well, I'm not saying they weren't, I'm saying that it's a different kind of artist books that were around in the '70s. '70s was a lot of self-publication. Yeah, there was visual poetry happening, Richard Tipping probably wants to rip my head off my shoulders, that sort of thing. There was lots of publications, but they weren't this sort of publication. This was a very particular European, the art, the unbound European book, it just wasn't seen. Everything was sort of stapled and photocopied.

And the art school Library used to have a fantastic collection of 1970s photo books, and conceptual books that we all sort of dug into. And people made those in graphics, but Petr Herel had his particular way of doing things. And watching him talk about them was so beautiful, you just wanted to be in there, and you just wanted to do it. So everyone was on board. Yeah.

Anyone else? I think it's time for a graphic investigation reunion somewhere that's accessible, because I'd love to hear all the stories. Yeah. Oh, over there? Thanks Fran.

Audience member 3:

Thank you, Caren, I learned a great deal from your talk, but not being totally in the loop, do you have something to say about what you think the future of artist books in general, within Australia, is likely to be? And how much of what's happening, say now, hinges on, or is derived from this time period that you talked about?

Dr Caren Florance:

Goodness, I'm glad you asked that. It's been a really vibrant 20 years of artist book making. It's been a generation, and I think it's starting to ease off now. I think digital books are really big, digital concept books, Risograph printing, that sort of thing, perfect bound, there's lots being made, but they're all sort of more designer books these days. It's much more computer central, and everyone using their software. And they're still making books, but I find the people who are making these sort of artist books tend to be of a generation. And I could be wrong, there could be people coming out from underneath, but I don't know how when most of the universities are sort of downscaling their material processes.

I'm a big believer in eras. And I think we've had an era, and it's actually quite good as a researcher, because it's a capsule that you can actually say, "I'm looking at this." But yeah, I don't know how long these sort of books will continue. I think, as I said, there's lots of books being made around the world, and shout out to Sarah Bodman and all her mob in England doing a great job of keeping artists books going. But yeah, I do think we're sort of reaching sort of a tipping point out of an era. Yeah, I'd like to think I was wrong.

Ooh, there's two. Oh, Deidre. I want to hear Deidre, and then here. Speaking of teaching artist books.

Deidre: Thanks Caren. That was just really fantastic. And my knowledge of this area is from snippets that I've heard over a very long time. So it's put a lot of pieces together for me. And I have to say, the last crop of artist book students, we brought down to the NLA, they saw the 'Orbis', and we talked about the legacy-

Dr Caren Florance: Great.

Deidre: ... so it's great to know more for future as well. But I'm also kind of interested in your thoughts around... Sorry, I've got a bit of feedback here.

Dr Caren Florance: Yeah.

Deidre: I'm also interested in your thoughts around collecting, nationally? And I know you touched on that before, and how I suppose what the state of collecting is now, institutionally? Because it does feel very much like it ebbs and flows depending on who's employed where, at any given time?

Dr Caren Florance: Personality driven, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. I mean, there was a golden age when we had Des Cowley and Helen Cole, and all these people who were just. And they had funds and they had sponsors, and they could get things. And it does ebb and flow. They're still collecting, one door opens, another one shuts. The New South Wales Library seems to be opening up a bit now. Whereas, I mean, the National Library used to collect a lot and now it's sort of not. So it's all about funding, it's all about people, it really is just. You've just got to sort of, I don't know, keep your ears and eyes open, and keep hassling.

Do what Paul Uhlmann did, just drop in and say, "Hey, what about this?" And encourage your students to do that. It's the only way that keeps it alive in people's eyes really, is to keep showing new work, and putting your foot in the door, I think. But yeah, I mean, everyone knows how bad money is these days. Can we just reset everything and start again? I don't know. It's a bad time to be an artist, really. Yeah. Sorry, there was a question over here.

Brett: Yes. Hi Caren.

Dr Caren Florance: Hi.

Brett: It's Brett. I wanted to say thank you very much for a wonderful talk.

Dr Caren Florance: This is Brett, by the way. Who made the book.

Brett: I was the 1982 student and country boy, coming into a town like Canberra was a big shock for me. I learned so much from Petr and the team, and the group that were there, and I went on into a different career. But it was still my foundation, and I still have my collection. I still have paper on the wall, that hasn't changed. And I wish I could get into it, and I think when I retire, I might get into a bit more.

Dr Caren Florance: Yeah. We might have another resurgence of everyone in their retirement age?

Brett: Yeah.

Dr Caren Florance: Great.

Brett: Over the years, I've shown people what that course did, and the amount of people who were really interested in paper and illustration and collage, and it was just awesome, and I wish it was still going. I

Dr Caren Florance: Well, there's still, I mean, there's a person in this room here that's very excited about papermaking, because there's a fantastic sort of culture in Tasmania at the moment. They make, it's called Paper on Skin and they make paper clothes, and it's a fashion thing. Because Tasmania's kept its papermaking culture, thanks to Penny Carey-Wells and other people like that.

And so there's a new resurgence of interest, because it's gone to fashion, and in a era where we're all interested in the environment. That's actually a really exciting thing, to think that people are still making paper, and still doing things. And so maybe there's a new generation that's going to get invigorated into the... Yeah. I'll get to you.

Keziah Craven: Yeah. Just a-

Dr Caren Florance: Grab a, grab a-

Keziah Craven: ... just in-

Dr Caren Florance: Grab a mic. But Katherine's going to say something first. This is the person you need to talk to. Katherine?

Katherin Nix: I just wanted to pay a tribute to Dorothy Herel, Petr's wife.

Dr Caren Florance: Yes.

Katherin Nix: Because she was a fashion designer.

Dr Caren Florance: Yes.

Katherin Nix: And she made dance costumes, first of all from banana fibre paper that Gaynor had made. And then I made her, for a dance programme at the National Gallery, based on the Celtic Gold, was Meryl Tankard. And I made the kenaf paper, and then Dorothy made these wonderful costumes. So she too was a very clever person.

Dr Caren Florance: Thanks. So Katherine Nix, meet Keziah Craven-

Keziah Craven: Hi.

Dr Caren Florance: ... who's also a new generation of paper people.

Keziah Craven: So just to add what you were saying before, because I am doing my PhD, am looking at papermaking and making wearable art out of paper. That there is quite a surgence in America at the moment. A lot of papermakers are making artist books as a foundation to keep their art practise going. And yeah, it's a big industry, and with more and more of them attending Paper on Skin in Tassie and coming to Australia, I think it's going to keep it going here as well.

Dr Caren Florance: I hope so. Yeah. I mean, apart from the water side of things, it's actually a really amazing sort of environmental thing to make fibre, out of your own fibre, your own paper. Anyone else? Oh, yes.

Audience member 4: Thanks mate. That was awesome. So after this fellowship, can you talk a little bit about your own creative practise, and how this fellowship might change things for you?

Dr Caren Florance: Ooh, this is a Dorothy Dix.

Audience member 4: Please?

Dr Caren Florance: I'm just about to restart my practise. I've just built a shed. I'm putting together all my letterpress equipment. I looked at a Locks' press book the other day, which is a fine press that operated in Australia, and they used a handmade paper called bartram green. And I thought, "Oh, this is the most beautiful feeling paper." And so I got on the internet to see if Bartram Green was still around, and I found an art shop in England that still had one, half a pack of the paper. So I bought it, dear reader.

And so I'm looking forward to printing on beautiful paper, and finding people who make beautiful paper, and getting it all happening again over the next, probably about 10 years for me I reckon. Yeah. So I will be hopefully in the next few years getting people to come and collaborate and print, and make things and books. And yeah, it might start a little something in the area, I'm in the Bega Valley, so it might start a little community there. I don't know. Thanks. Anyone else keen for a question? We must be getting to the end here. Now or never? Okay.

Nicki Mackay-Sim: We might be...

Dr Caren Florance: We might be there.

Nicki Mackay-Sim: No more? I know we've got such talent in this room.

Dr Caren Florance: Oh, it's amazing.

Nicki Mackay-Sim: Excellent.

Dr Caren Florance: Look at this community.

Nicki Mackay-Sim: This community. I know, it's fantastic. Okay, look, we better wind up then, but you can snaffle her at the end, or myself, if you've got anything to offer the Library. I don't really know what to say now. Look, thank you Caren, thank you so much. I'm so glad that this fellowship came to happen.

Dr Caren Florance: It's been great.

Nicki Mackay-Sim: It's been a long time coming. Thank you also very much for fossicking in the Pioneer Collection, for these stories behind the Artist's Book Collection, and for finding some of our sins as well.

Dr Caren Florance: That was the best bit.

Nicki Mackay-Sim: We'll follow up some of those description doozies as well as those stickers.

Dr Caren Florance: I've made a long list.

Nicki Mackay-Sim: Yes. No doubt, there have been stickers put on other things around the Library, haven't there? I can see Erica Ryan over there formerly of the Library, and she knows where a few stickers are too.

Dr Caren Florance: We're not saying you did it, we're just saying you know about it.

Nicki Mackay-Sim: No, no, exactly. No, we're all clean. We're tidying up. Anyway, I will wind that up in just saying, thank you very much again.

Dr Caren Florance: Thank you very much.

Nicki Mackay-Sim: And look, just as we come to a close, I'll give out a few quick plugs before we leave. I hope you can join us for our next fellowship lecture, which is to be on Thursday, the 31st of October. That's next week, isn't it? At 12:30 PM. Dr Burcu Cevik-Compiegni, will be delivering her paper on Turkish-Australian, transnational life writing.

And also go to our website where you'll be able to find recordings of our recent talks, and performances from our fellows. And these are also available, of course, on the Library's YouTube channel too. So thanks very much again, Caren, for a fabulous presentation, and we'll see you all back here soon, I hope, next Thursday.