Blog

Greetings from Urunga, near Bellingen in New South Wales. I had a fantastic week printmaking for the second year at Camp Creative with Seraphina Martin, a Sydney printmaking teacher. It was such a great week I'm thinking of coming back for the third year next year, with her. Then again, now I have a studio and some space, I've also been thinking of buying my own press and setting up in Canada. And then serendipity struck! I picked up my email and there was a note from an artist in the Okanagan telling me that Shatford Centre had a printmaking press that hadn't been assembled since its purchase last year. Looks like an opportunity to me!

Right now I'm discovering how technologically limited I am--or rather, how much I have to learn--as I'm struggling to upload my latest works to this website. Using a friend's Mac seemed like a good idea since I'm travelling without a computer, but I haven't quite got the knack on a Mac so have resorted to posting this quick update and will fill in some photos of the printmaking process and the resulting work a bit later.

We made 4 types of plates in the course, one of which was new to me. They were all non-toxic which means I'll be comfortable doing them back home, and will only have to source some of the plates (especially the solar etching plates) and supplies. I can see I'll be collecting more collage-like types of materials, including images, dried flat plant materials, interesting textures on paper, cloth and plastic items (also relatively flat) as well as wanting to obtain some old botanical, animal and insect plates for photo-copying onto acetate sheets. These items will feed very nicely into my attraction to collages and possibly to other work I'm contemplating as well!

All very exciting and I'm very happy to be spending some time in my favourite country this time of year. The weather has been much hotter than last year as you may have seen in the news, but I've been far from any of the terrible fires so far. Hopefully that continues as I work my way further north towards Bundaberg next week.

That's all for now, stay tuned for more work to be posted!