Sunday, June 2, 2013

Artist in Residence - sharing with the community

I'm now in workshop mode at my Art Residency at Blackall.  Part of my community contribution is to run workshops in printmaking and artist books for children and adults.

On Friday I had a visit by Distance Education children and their mothers.  They had some fun printing onto tags, book pages and envelopes using gelatine plates that I had made.  An hour of chaos but they all seemed pleased with their results.  And I'm sure the Mums were glad to find another inexpensive school holiday activity!




For the past 2 days, I've been running a monoprinting and concertina book workshop for 12 lovely ladies.  I had made a lot of gelatine plates in the past week - the cool room in the kitchen was full of them!

Gelatine plates in the cool room. 
Cool rooms are common out here, I would have had
trouble fitting them all into the fridge.
We used both gelatine plates and my permanent gelli-arts plates.   It was interesting to see how both types of plates performed.  The temperature was around 27% with about 50% humidity, a little too hot for the gelatine plates which started to fall apart by early afternoon under the pressure of usage.
But even the permanent plates suffered a little dryness as well, the gelatine overall performed better in the dry air as they held plenty of moisture.  It was interesting to find some preferred the permanent plates, others liked the gelatine.

Busy printing


Sally and I reviewed her monoprints, easier
to see all laid out together.  We were planning
which ones to include in her concertina book


Working hard and making lots of mess,
lucky the space was big enough!

Ros working on her book using her lovely prints

A selection of completed books,
filled with dozens of colourful prints
Tomorrow we've got the Coptic Bound Journal workshop, there's sure to be lots more creative action, lovely morning tea goodies (everyone bakes around here, no cakes from Woolies!) and a great opportunity to use up those monoprints that didn't quite work - nothing is ever wasted....

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