Beginnings
When I started art school in 1985 I’d never heard of printmaking. Before enrolling in an art certificate course at East Sydney Technical College, I’d dropped out of an arts/social studies degree at Sydney University. During that year of dropping out I started to learn to draw and really enjoyed it and had a reasonable facility.
My father tolerated my shift to visual arts because his mother, Margaret Oppen had been very involved in the arts as a printmaker and painter during the Sydney Moderns period (1920-40s) and in the late 1950s had founded the NSW Embroiderer’s Guild.
It was because of the structure of the art certificate program at East Sydney Technical College that I was introduced to printmaking. Unlike in the other two institutions at that time, City Art Institute and Sydney College of the Arts where you had to select your major and minor subject upfront, at East Sydney in the first year of study/practice every student did every subject as well as lots of drawing. The program gave us invaluable exposure to different media.
I loved photography which was of course pre-digital, b/w film, dark room processing etc. but knew I would never be a photographer, everything was always slightly out of control and very hit or miss but also magical.
In sculpture we spent a whole semester learning casting, first modelling a clay head portrait of our teacher Ian Mackay through to making the plaster mould and casting it in concrete.
Like most printmakers, it was the process which appealed to me. We started with etching and aquatint. Zinc plates, bitumen ground and nitric acid, a feather and a timer. Rosin in a box, a hot plate and more bitumen, nitric acid, a feather and a timer.
The limit of occupational health and safety was having the acid baths and the rosin box in small separate rooms away from the open studio and being told “don’t breathe in the fumes, don’t breathe in the dust. The fumes will burn out lungs. The dust clog up your lungs”. At least the ink wasn’t going to kill us though the turps fumes which filled the studio would.
I think also the appeal of printmaking was you could be lazy with drawing. Your lines were transformed through acid, metal and ink. The physicality of your lines in the print punched back at you and a dialogue ensued. With etching and acquaint you could work back into the plate, into the image and wrestle it into something new. “Go with the flow” was the best strategy.
Books and print are the best of bedfellows. Can I say print was invented for books? Two circumstances took me from simply making prints to making books.
1. I liked working in series, two, three or four images which related.
2. I didn’t like the way framing behind glass deadened the three-dimensionally of the printed surface on the paper.
So I decided to make a book. When I thought “books with pictures” I thought kids’ books.
Wah-Hah and the Lemon Yellow Crest
Book size: 57.5 x 39.5 cm / Plate size: 44.5 x 30.0 cm / No.of plates 29 / ed. 10 / Year 1988
Every work is a confluence of personal history, ideas, aspirations and circumstances. This book is all that. It has a strong environmental message rather heavily stated. It draws from my upbringing in the northern suburbs of Sydney where we lived on the edge of bushland, now Gadigal National Park, my father pointing out the wonky way that sulphur crested cockatoos flew and being allowed to roam with the other kids in the street through the brush down to the creek. It is imbued with a love of that place, this more than human world, a sense of its importance and validity not needing human justification to exist. Humans are absent from the story, except all the animals have a human psychology.
The East Sydney Technical College certificate was a two year course. I went on to City Art Institute to do a bachelors degree in Visual Arts. I decided to continue to focus on printmaking so chose it as my major.
Also I had started bookbinding. I had approached Daphne Lera at D S Murray Bookbinders in the Gowings Building. She allowed me to bind Wah-Hah at her bindery and I paid her a bindery access fee. I’d done a bookbinding evening course at TAFE over two semesters.
Daphne guided me. She then offered me a job. For 4 years I worked 2-3 days a week.
I continued working on book projects throughout the 2.5 years study at City Art Institute, working with etching, metal and acid bite and also relief, linocuts; playing with narrative through image and text.
Rebecca’s Diary
Book size: 25.5 x 17cm / Plate size:17 x 11cm / no. of plates 56 / ed. 15 / Year 1990
I was interested in fairy tales. Particularly the disconnection that came with being in Australia, in the antipodes, with a book of European fairytales set in a different ecology, in a different social and historical context. The odd sense of this history being ours yet not. It was like we, Australia, were flaked off, we were culturally insignificant to the highbrow arrogant cultural centre, yet we were still clinging, forever echoing someone else’s stories, struggling to create our own, ashamed of our low brow history, forever aspiring to someone else’s cultural greatness. I think they call it cultural cringe. It is best depicted every year in the fake snow for a summer Christmas.
Perhaps the disconnection was more pronounced for me because my family was mixed up. My grandmother whom I’ve already mentioned was born in Newcastle in 1890, she was already second generation Australian and methodist. However she still thought of England/Scotland as “home”. She married a British navel officer of German/English decent and my father and his brother were both born in the UK. My mother on the other hand was Swiss 100% and catholic. I didn’t fit in to the Anglo protestant heritage nor the Irish Catholic.
I mention this because a sharp observer will notice the Australian flowers and the Australian looking trees depicted in this book. I was wrestling with placing the story into the Australian context.
Rebecca’s Diary is supposedly the diary of the girl, Cinderella. I renamed the girl because Cinderella or in German Aschenputtel was a derogatory nickname, so she wouldn’t have called herself this. Why Rebecca? Because I liked the name.
I worked from the Bros Grimm version of the story and the timeframe of the diary is all prior to the major events, the balls, the prince etc. There are significant differences between the Bros Grimm version and its French cousin, which has since been further sanitised by Disney. The German version is more violent and not as well known.
I wanted to round out the character of the girl, give her voice and interiority. It is a coming of age story. There is no introduction, no explanation, she is not writing for an audience. So someone picking up the book won’t have much of a clue to what it’s about. Well, perhaps not, not the specific circumstance of the writing, but if they were to persist I think the bigger picture would crystallise because there is a universe element in it.
The book is structured around a lunar month, 28 days and a year, the four seasons. There are 56 plates. 28 paired pages > the 28 days, divided into 4 groups of 7 weeks > 4 seasons, > 7 days of the week.
Working with text
Getting text onto the page, it is a perennial problem. Back when I started making books I had not heard of letterpress. I’d neither thought about the process of printing generally, nor specifically book printing or publishing. There were lots of books at home when I grew up but they were standard books, commercially produced paperbacks and hard cover volumes, not antiquarian books.
At art school the focus was very much on 2D (painting, drawing, printmaking, photography) and 3D (sculpture) work and at City Art Institute film was also offered. But no one was making books. I didn’t know how to get text onto the page. So I had to improvise. In the two books I have spoken about you can see two different approaches.
In Wah-Hah and the Lemon Yellow Crest I had a rubber stamp alphabet made and I hand stamped the text, letter by letter then it was transferred on to a transparent sheet. The zinc plates I bought had a photo-sensitive emulsion across the print surface. I exposed the text first. The UV light hardened the exposed surface and where it was not exposed, the text, the emulsion could be washed away. The hardened emulsion acted as a barrier to the acid. After the plate had been washed it could go into the acid bath, biting in the text.
In Rebecca’s Diary the text was handwritten. Why does it look childlike? If you know the direct print process you know the text on the block or plate or stone has to be reversed to print right way. So I wrote the text back to front da Vinci style! He was better at it. But I was fully aware that the hand writing was appropriate to the work. I wrote as well as a I could. I didn’t want to imitate childish writing. In a similar way the drawings are not dumbed-down.
In this work Tale of Love which is a unbound sequence of prints, the text was cut in lino blocks.
In The Rising except where the text is bitten into the title plate, there is no text at all!
(hiatus)
Motherhouse
Book size: 32 x 24cm / Medium: collage, multi-media / ed. unique / Year 1995
Making books in this way was hugely time consuming. Working for Daphne we had to keep time sheets. I started doing this while working on Rebecca’s Diary recording the time preparing, editioning, hand colouring and binding. I calculated it took 100 hours to produce each book. That time didn’t include the researching, writing, developing of the text.
When I had two small children I couldn’t get my head around this amount of time to produce new editioned work. Motherhouse is a one-off book produced at the time. My world was full of picture books, counting books etc. The images were pulled from my bundle of reject and proof prints. The text is rubber-stamped or handwritten. It was bound by Daphne.
For the next 10 years I focussed on writing for children and trying to get published with little success.
In the mid 1990s I came across the two books by Peter Lyssiotis at Nicholas Pounder’s Bookshop then in Double Bay. I bought the books. I was fascinated.
Collaboration
Towards the mid 2000s I decided to abandoned the children’s writing and pulled out a text I’d written years earlier. It was called The Dreamhouse. It was based on an etching I had make when still at art school. With a new stamina from all those years of writing and having gained an understanding of how important editing was, I reworked the text. I had imagined photo images with this rather surreal text.
Since purchasing Peter’s books, Nick Pounder’s bookshop had closed and my address had been passed on to Peter. In the late 1990s he had sent a new book for me to look at. Which I also bought. I was filled with a deep nostalgia for the book world I’d left.
In 2005 I looked again at those first two books I had of Peter’s. What fascinated me were the photomontages which were so good I could suspend disbelief and convince myself they were actual photos. I summoned the courage to send him my text and ask if he would be interested in making the images. Yes. The answer came back. It might take a bit of time. Well, I thought, okay, not a problem. I was thinking months but within weeks the images started arriving.
I can no longer recall the images I’d imagined. Waiting for Peter’s images, I’d prepped, telling myself whatever came back would be completely different to anything I was imagining. And yes, that’s how it was. But I was thrilled. So the next phase of book production began. Collaboration.
Seven Rooms
Book size: 23 x 22cm / Medium: offset print / ed. 17 / Year 2007
You can see how different this book is from the books I had produced earlier.
I found the process of collaboration was like the non-mathematical equation of 1 + 1 = 5. Sharing the work of making the book easier, made the task lighter. Collaboration was new to me. Never in art school did we collaborate, nor were we encouraged to collaborate. The only faculty where there was an exception was film.
Collaborating is a specific skill. All parties have to let go ownership of the project to a certain degree. You have to trust the others will bring something which you had never imagined or were incapable of bringing yourself. It can be hard. Perhaps coming from a printmaking background might have made it easier because as I described earlier you are constantly letting go of your head image, what you imagined, and looking at what the plate has given you. You adjust to move the work in the direction towards a ‘finished’ print.
Seven Rooms offered a new world of book production for me. I set the text in QuarkXpress. I was very particular about pacing the reader through the book. I selected the images from the pile Peter had send. Although the batches came in response to particular chapters I could move them and place them where I thought they best fitted. The project was offset printed, the images on tracing paper and the text on Mohawk superfine paper.
You will notice I have not mentioned the term the artist’s book. That’s because I’d never heard the term. When I’d been making books in the 1980s I didn’t really know anyone else making books. Perhaps it was partly because I was caught up in my own world because I was invited to put a book into an exhibition of books organised by a fellow student. The exhibition was at the Goethe Institute in Sydney. Also while at City Art someone had mentioned the Graphic Investigation Workshop at the Canberra School of Art. But I was tiring of tertiary education and didn’t want to move to Canberra and continue studying.
I’d stayed in touch with Daphne and in late 2005 she mentioned she was heading to Mackay (Queensland) in February 2006 to the Artspace events, a symposium and the inaugural Libris Award—would I be interested in coming? I went. Bam! Not only the tropical heat hit me for six. The exhibition of work was stunning. It was hard to take it in. I had entered the world of the artist’s book. Here I’d like to acknowledge the work of Robert Heather, Helen Cole and Des Cowley.
The River
Book size: 22 x 32cm / Medium: digital print, photographs / Year 2009
For this photo book the images were shot in film. Shot in Paris it is mainly a single sequence, shot at twilight of a walk through the streets. I was curious to see if it was possible to capture a city, a famous, hyper-tourist city without including a single tourist attraction, a single cliche. The advantage of shooting on film was there could be no checking the images, no editing, no controlling. The other criteria was not looking through the lens, no framing shots, simply shooting from the hip so to speak.
We shot three sequences. Each sequence had different parameters. 1. take a shot every time a corner is turned,
2. take a shot every 20 seconds,
3. take a shot every 10 steps.
It was the third option that turned out to be the ONE. By chance it was getting to the end of the day when we took this walk. At the time I was aware of the longer shutter speed. I thought, this might be interesting, or a total failure. I guess those photography classes I’d taken all those year ago helped, they had shifted my thinking away from the idea of capturing a decisive moment.
Back in Australia, the film was professionally processed, photos printed and digitised.
Working with these images, putting the book together, I realised there was not a single iconic or statement image amongst them. No decisive moment, every image by itself, mediocre — but this in fact was the best result. I learned for this book to work, every image needed the other images to lift it into significance. The potential monotony of the walk is broken by a few out of sequence images, a view to the side or down towards the river. These side images taken on a different evening.
The role of the text by Peter, not about the walk, nor about Paris nor the Seine in particular but about a river, adds another dimension to the work, the river as passage, as life force.
The work is influenced by photographer Brassai’s book Paris de Nuit, of 1933, the first photographs to capture night life in Paris. The first edition was spiral bound. So we gave our book a spiral binding.
The following two books deal with war…
Stabat Mater
Book size: 58 x 42cm / Medium: intaglio, relief, screen print / Year 200
The Stabat Mater is a 13th century prayer. Addressed to Mary mother of God, the request is for intercession, the sinners wanting her to put in a good word for them with the hope it would smooth the way to heaven after death. However here we have not translated, but shifted the focus to the mothers who grieve their sons lost in the endless wars which continue to flare around the world. The highly emotive language echoes the original prayer. The final cry is for peace.
The work is a concertina printed both sides. The figure of the young man, my son, is life size.
In this work I have used photopolymer plates on the ‘front’ and on the reverse side screen printing.
It is the first time I used photo-polymer plates. They came into the printmaking studios at art schools after I graduated. They can be prepared for intaglio printing as well as relief.
It was also a first using screen printing. The screen printing inks had changed hugely from the 1980s when I was in art school when all the inks needed turps wash out. Now inks were water-based.
When the soldiers…
Book size: 22 x 33.5cm / Medium: mixed media / ed. unique / Year 2009
When the Soldiers… acknowledges the women raped in war, which was to be listed as a war crime, shifted away from collateral damage or the victor’s privilege. I have sought to personalise the women. All the silhouettes are different. The fabrics are various. These women are mother, daughter, aunt…
This book is a unique work. There is a real freedom of possibility when an edition doesn’t have to be produced. Any effect you create doesn’t have to repeatable. Text is hand writing, stencilled, as well as home office printed and stuck on like a bandaid.
(reassessment)
After a 7 year period of intense collaboration it was time to have a break. It took over a year to clear my head and pull towards a direction, a path I wanted to continue along.
Influences
Before I discuss more recent work I would like to list some influences.
We stand on the shoulders of giants.
William Blake, the artist as rebellious citizen.
People say that the artist book arose in the 1960s. But if you study the work of William Blake he is the complete book artist.
Born in 1757 in London he lived over a tumultuous period of history, the American Revolution and the French Revolution. England consolidated and increased its global reach taking new colonies and with other European nations, France, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Spain shifted towards peak power through colonisation of the rest of the planet. The conceptualisation of the Orient vs the West proclaiming European superiority, justified colonial violence. Blood flowed.
Moving into the 1800s full implementation of the industrial revolution took effect, shifting the flow of wealth and therefore the powerbrokers from the landed gentry to the new industrialists. Also the rise of modern science began to strip the world of its mysticism. God was pushed aside.
Against all this William Blake rebelled. Specifically against the fragmentation of the production process, including in his trade of engraving, into separate tasks stripping the artisan of his wholistic skill and his creative control of the whole process. This is preempted the machination of labour where the worker in the factory must work to the rhythm of the machine and the worker becomes a replaceable unit and generally against a thinking that stripped the world, all living things of their holiness and wholeness.
Through the 1790s Blake wrote, printed and bound with the collaboration of his wife Catherine, his most significant works, his illuminated books. They are completely original. His printmaking is experimental, the small editions he did produce are variable. He was not interested in producing a homogenous product. His work can read both vertically and horizontally by which I mean the poem itself can be read but you must read across poems too. The images don’t illustrate the text but rather tell a counter or complimentary narrative.
Saree Makdisi’s book William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s is the best book I’ve read about William Blake. Makdisi is a Palestinian professor of comparative literature at Columbia Univeristy. He has the advantage of looking in from the outside. The English art historians have tried to fit William Blake in their art history and all the bits that don’t fit they write off as Blake’s “madness”. Makdisi argues that Blake was not mad.
The problem is the cultural, political winners get to write history and write it as though their success was inevitable, counter narratives are forgotten or buried, and the past is turned into nostalgia. We struggle to think outside the box.
Joseph Beuys & the Fluxus movement
The work of Joseph Beuys and the Fluxus movement (I dare to say) is the most significant art movement of the late 20th century. Art being solely a tradable product, simply an object, was rejected. It was inadequate. Fluxus artists said art could be an action, a happening, a performance. Joseph Beuys shifted the discussion back to the cultural role of art in response to society, to challenge social norms rather than to just produce products.
Frank Stella & printmaking as a medium
In 2017 I saw the exhibition of Frank Stella prints from the Ken Tyler collection at the NGA. The scale of these works was amazing. But most significantly what they expressed was the print medium at its best. Stella who hadn’t really been interested in print changed his mind when he realised there were effects that were unique to print. That the process offered possibilities which could only be realised through print. Traditionally the print process had been a means of reproducing drawings. The engravers, like Blake and those of earlier eras, were given drawings which they then rendered in metal. Sometimes these drawings were barely more than a rough sketch. But print had moved beyond this role of drawing translation
Consolidation
THE BOTANIKOS PROJECT is an ongoing project.
The engagement with Nature has always been in my work. I decided I should bring it to the fore. My interest in plants and environment ran all the back to my schooling days and science lessons. I conceptualised The Botanikos Project around interaction and observation of the environments around me. There are three zones.
Zone 1 is my garden at home, Zone 2 is the urban environment in which I live , and zone 3 is a bush block I own in the Hunter Valley which qualified for conservation in 2010.
A component of Zone 3 is the diary I keep of my monthly trips to the Hunter, recording my activities, observations and the changes to the block but also the surrounding land. I also record my work with botanists monitoring the rare plant which occurs in North Rothbury.
The books which come out of these zones are the works of the Botanikos Project.
Of Property Of Nature
Book size: 50 x 36.5cm / Medium: intaglio, relief, letterpress / ed. 12 / Year 2023
This is a Zone 2 book. Based around prints which were made for inclusion in the Waringah Print Studio suite of prints, Natural Collection which is also featured in the Paper Universe exhibition, I had leftover 12 extra prints. The print work looked at the intersection of the penguin breeding colony in Manly and urban development. For the book I chose texts to introduce the work on the title page, and I wrote a new text.
The text has been printed with wood type. 40 years after first dealing with getting text onto the page in art school, I was still faced with the same problem. I never thought I would buy type but drawers of type came up for auction at Lawsons and I bought them. I have no press and work very crudely in a low broad box into which I can lock the type, using strips of timber to fill extra space and cardboard or foam core as leading and spacers. The text is inked and printed as one would print a relief print. One of the issues with type is that you run out of letters which is why I have combined two typefaces but still every page was printed in two stages.
Do Not Lament / Song of the Axe
Book size: 32.5 x 45cm / Medium: intaglio, solvent transfer prints / no. of plates: 14 / ed. 8 / Year 2018
This book is a Zone 3 book. The block of land I have owned for close to 30 years is in the lower Hunter Valley, in North Rothbury close to Branxton. It is spotted gum, iron leafed iron bark woodland, an endangered ecological community. There are rare plants on the block including the highly endangered Persoonia pauciflora.
Along my northern boundary a huge development is going in. Do not lament / The song of the axe is response to the changes bursting across the landscape due this development. The Song of the Axe is a poem published in 1929 by the Australian poet Marie Pitt. She sings the song of the axe which with every ring of its blade biting into a tree is bringing civilisation to this wild land. The consequences of this clearing have been huge.
However the environment has an incredible ability to recover, to a certain degree. Huge areas of the East coast were cleared, much of the tree cover you might see is regrowth. If it is relatively recent less than 50 years you can pick it because all the trees are about the same age, height and quite closely packed.
My block is not much different though from research I have done it wasn’t cleared as thoroughly as other areas around me. In spite of this the rare Persoonia has survived.
The new development is proceeding apace. Beyond the areas along water courses, the level of clearing is alarming. Not a blade of grass remains. The land is pushed into shape. The houses begin to pop up like mushrooms.
The images in this book are dry points on steel. I used the backs of the photopolymer plates from the Stabat Mater project. The photographic images are image transfers as is the text of the poem. There are is another text which I wrote in response to Marie Pitt’s poem which was printed offset.
THE ARMED MAN
This project is a collaborative project with Peter Lyssiotis. After 10 years of not collaborating we decided to work together again.
Dealing with war and peace has been a part of our work. It’s a huge topic and a serious topic. There is plenty of subject matter! Currently we have multiple separate works in process. The more we read the more we struggle to dive deeper into the topic through our work.
The title of the project comes from a medieval French song. We draw on the image of the armed man as armed with knowledge.
War against War / War or Peace
Book size: 30 x 22cm / Medium: digital print / ed. open (24) / Year 2025
This double book opens both to the left and the right. The pages from either side interleave. The pairings have been carefully chosen to work off each other and to follow a narrative arc. To the left are Peter’s manipulated images and to the right are street photographs I’ve taken on my walking around local Sydney suburbs and also on a trip to Germany of graffiti, posters, murals which reference peace. There are also screenshots which reference peace.
At the core of the book is a quote from Persian poet Rumi; Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
We Want Peace not War
Book size: 40 x 21cm / Medium: mixed media / ed. unique / Year 2025
This work shines the light of the destruction through war and conflict of the more than human world. It is also a prototype for a series of 4 books wrestling with the depiction peace. The text of this work houses out-takes from the other four books.
I wanted to experiment with using thin aluminium sheets as a board covering material. The sheets are discarded offset printing plates. The text is printed using both wood and metal type. The images are painted, collaged and there are relief prints.
To wrap up
In working with the book I have come to know it advantages and disadvantages. I’ll mention the disadvantages first.
One disadvantage is people expect books to be cheap. But they are only cheap because they are printed and bound mechanically in the thousands. The amount of work that goes into making a book is huge. Yet the work can’t be priced to recoup that labour let alone the inspiration. You sell your labour for below award rates and you get nothing for your inspiration. How do you put a price on inspiration anyway?
Another disadvantage is they don’t exhibit well. Because they are meant to be read. They reveal themselves over time, so they can never be seen as a complete work in one hit. This is why I favour libraries as locations for these books to end up. Because libraries allow access to readers.
People have asked me—then why do you do it?
Well, the advantages are:
Now I’m going to repeat myself, they reveal themselves over time, so the work can never be seen in one hit. This is the very nature of the medium. It’s like a core quality, aspect or element of the book. They offer a depth of engagement with the subject matter. They offer privacy of the reading experience, intimacy, and with this, the possibility of working with difficult, distressing subjects— the work doesn’t have to be pretty.
They allow physical engagement, touching, the haptic interaction the reader has with the work has real power. It is a privilege to hold a someone’s book and be allowed to read through it.
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This talk was given in September 2025 at the State Library of NSW, an event in the Artist Unbound talk series held in conjunction with the exhibition PAPER UNIVERSE: THE BOOK AS ART. (12th August 2025–3 May 2026) I would like to thank Maria Savvidis and Daniela Baldry for this opportunity to talk about my art pracitice.