From the archives: Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison workshop

A while back (um, quite a while) Gracia Haby and Louise Jennison held an evening workshop on how to make a concertina fold notebook. It's always so lovely, and not to mention great fun as well, when artists host workshops!

Here are some images from the event:

Photography: Kim Brockett

Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison, 'A key to help make your own world visible'

Inspired by Hermann Hesse’s classic novel Der Steppenwolf Gracia Haby and Louise Jennison present a new collection of artist books, fine lithographic offset prints and other works on paper.

In Der Steppenwolf the ‘Magic Theatre’ is a hallucinatory, parallel world controlled by saxophone player, Pablo: “I can throw open to you no picture-gallery but your own soul,” he tells the suffering protagonist Harry, “All I can give you is the opportunity, the impulse, the key. I help you to make your own world visible. That is all.” Taking its cue from Hesse’s surrealistic landscape, A Key to Help Make Your Own World Visible presents a series of hidden interior topographies; worlds existing somewhere between the pain and beauty of things past.

Gracia Haby and Louise Jennison have worked collaboratively for the past ten years, chiefly using paper as their medium. From carefully constructed limited edition artists’ books to works on paper, they record, deconstruct and rebuild miniature worlds. Graduates of RMIT, they have exhibited together both locally and abroad. They were awarded the Australia Council for the Arts, New Work for Emerging Artists grant in 2000, and the Freedman Foundation Travelling Scholarship for Emerging Artists in 2002, and their work is represented in the collections of Artspace Mackay; Bibliotheca Librorum Apud Artificem; Ergas Collection; Melbourne, Monash, RMIT and Charles Sturt Universities; UWE Bristol; the State Libraries of New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland; Print Council of Australia; Latrobe Regional Gallery, Burnie Regional Gallery and Warrnambool Art Gallery and various private collections.

Postcard collages

Installation view

Gracia and Louise's exhibition in Gallery 2 was on from 23 October to 28 November. During this time, they also CLOG's esteemed guest bloggers (thank you ladies!). To view their posts, click here.

Don't forget to also check out their beautiful website + respective blogs (click here for Gracia's, and here for Louise's). It's a comprehensive collection of their work, publications and interviews.

To view more images from their recent exhibition, click here.

Photography by Richard Brockett

Up she goes, down she goes

Especially for you, a collection housed.

A view gleaned through looking-glass.

A concept favourable or perhaps not, we’ll leave that up to you, either way, what took two days to install took but two leisurely hours to take apart, pack up and leave gallery space bare, signage and all.

We so enjoyed our time in beauteous confines of gallery two. Equally so our time spent here. Thanks for having us. We have enjoyed having a lend of your ear.

G & L

Recalled

Taken Easter 1979 in St Arnaud (Victoria) with Dixie. I am almost four years of age.

It is the layout I remember first, the long passageways created. When I think of my grandparents’ garden in St Arnaud, it is a garden laid out in three long rows, allowing you to walk the length of the bed from either side, picking peas or hoeing turnips. A grapevine that ran the length of the three sides framed the garden whole, a neat belt to its green corridors. It may not have been so. It may not have been quite so long. For that you will have my memory to take. I recall it thus; it was thus. Memory is not for the factual reliance when it comes to any book stored in the mind.

There was sun suspended perpetually high above. There were plants taller than my height of five years lived, stretching the length of their wooden stakes, giving all the appearance of puppets pulled from high. Green beans grew and strawberries could be surreptitiously picked by hand. There were no leaves brown or laced with holes. It was an immaculate functioning garden and it belonged to Frank and Thelma. By their hand, it flourished. Cauliflower, carrot, potato and tomato, they were all there, vegetable peel from the kitchen, and tealeaves too, a composting role to play.

Seems this Thursday I am thinking of things past. Soon also to be relegated to halls of memory, our show at Craft Victoria and our artists’ books on display as part of the 2009 Geelong acquisitive print awards. The former draws to its close this Saturday come 5 pm, the latter the following day.

In a cabinet in the Geelong Gallery they sit, two concertina bindings of ours unfurled at full length, three fanned in shape of a star.

We pop in to turn the pages once more, and will miss doing so come next week.

Until next time,
G

A very different animal

Ready to give help.

Those familiar with my place high up in the trees and whom may also have glanced of late at the pages of my artists’ books and postcard collages know that there feature many animals, many birds. My tailed or feathered protagonists often out of place, oft too large for their present surrounds. They scale rooftops, climb cathedral spires; perch high on the mast of a ship on maiden voyage do my central characters. Sometimes they saunter nonchalantly past a city square. Sometimes they tiptoe or creep. And all the time they afford me chance not just to play with scale and humorous, I hope, foreign juxtapositions, but to convey feelings of awkwardness and oddness. They are out of place, not just in urban environment or strange land (the mountain lions home range is not Brussels), but also in feeling. Being animals, in form, they are easier to relate to. One is not distracted by the dissimilarities because there are so many. I am not covered in fur, with claws for fingertips and a tail to serve as rudder on mountain climb. I am so different that I look only at what the animal is doing in its new environment. It is on the sidelines, watching. It is looking for a safe place to curl. It is passing undetected. It is slinking through the city unseen. It, like me, feels the odd one out.

It was worth it if only to see the stars scuttle across the shore.

Fearful of losing them, time and time again.

It’s okay; your secret is safe with me.

In addition to what you can see here and in gallery two, I invite you to peer over my shoulder, I have tiny moving visuals captured with iPhone's aid for your amusement. But be forewarned, I am no filmmaker, seemed merely easiest way to share with you a book or two whose pages you cannot turn for yourself.

Over My Shoulder (I)
Blinking in the light

Over My Shoulder (II)
Eager for the old joys once more

Enjoy your eve, G

In the words of another

All memory of that night shone before fading. (2009)

On now in Gallery 2 of Craft Victoria is a collaboration between artists Gracia Haby and Louise Jennison that presents a wunderkammer of paintings, prints, collage, postcards and artist books.

A show that centres on themes of nostalgia, love and introspection, the title comes from words in Hermann Hesse’s 1927 novel Der Steppenwolf and the artists have created artefacts based on the story’s sense of longing and displacement. The result is an alternate universe of fantastic curiosities, of pain and dreams made flesh.

The ideas come together most successfully in the lithographs which take the best elements of the collages and watercolours and reflects most succinctly the theory behind the show. The combined skill of the artists and the quality of the work is capable of supporting the narrative concept, which after reading the exhibition statement would have been no easy feat.

A Key to Help Make Your Own World visible is a superb and intriguing exhibition that works well within the gallery space.

A Key to Help Make Your Own World Visible
Emma Kirsopp, The Melbourne Art Review

This evening

This evening, however, I am thinking of things past is twelve page concertina bound artists’ book of Gracia’s and mine. A four-colour lithographic offset print, each page has been reworked in colour pencil, adding detail to the green faces of the pair of Shell masks from Manfredo Settala’s (1600–1680) own cabinet of curiosities. On Fabriano bright white 300gsm paper, the book, an edition of twelve, is housed in a balsa wood case. It sits on a sunlit shelf in the gallery, and these are a few page details from said book.

I hope you like them, and I look forward to meeting those of you tonight attending our bookbinding workshop.





(Please click to enlarge and better see the detail.)

Artist Workshop
Learn how to make a concertina fold notebook with Gracia Haby and Louise Jennison. Materials will be provided.
Date: Wednesday 11 November, 6–9pm
Bookings: 03 9650 7775
Cost: $50 / $25 Craft Victoria Members

LJ

To hold in the palm of one's hand

On such a day as this the view proved of great comfort.

Thou should not vex a stranger.

Sunday morning and the wonder that is Google earth has me entranced still, and spooked, if I am honest, just a little. In my palm, I have the globe. It sits in other people’s palms too, and this technology is, it seems, doing my head in. I can drop a pin on my next destination; I can see just how very far the French Quarter is from my door (the place I last travelled across the seas to). I can map, track, zoom in and survey places with a tap, swish, stroke upon the smudgy screen of my iPhone. The concept is bewildering and I wonder: what will things be like when I am with grey hair?

Requiring little by way of technology are these postcard collages (some of which you can see in gallery two). Sharp scissors, glue and brush are the only tools needed.

I had always wished to do what was right though it never seemed as such.

It appeared before me now, more beautiful than ever.

Sporadic episodes of shadow puppetry went unseen.

No, I am not fond of this place.

If this place were my own, I'd move it closer to the sea.

(Postcard collages 2009. Please click to enlarge.)

Enjoy your day, G

(Additional postcard and photographic collages, page details and the like appear peppered throughout my blog. Here, friends, is link to but a few,
Look behind you.
There we will sit upon the rocks.
I'll read to you if you like.)

At every turn

All memory of that day sparkled right and unchanging. (2009)

Seems an age since we set to installing our show in gallery two of Craft Victoria but the calendar hanging upon my wall tells me otherwise. Seems it has not been that long at all. This is a good thing for we’ve been invited by the ever kind and ever knowledgeable folk at Craft Victoria to pen a few guest posts for the duration of our exhibition, the one with the long name that borrows directly from two sentences featured in the work of a favourite author.

Today we held true to our promise and turned the pages of the collaged books that sit atop the tables. Next week we shall turn them again, revealing a new host of animal inhabitants roaming the grounds of Versailles or traipsing though the streets of Johannesburg.

Here is but a taste, with more to come, of this you can be sure.

Turning the pages, one book at a time.

Page detail from They ate their meals on the grass and danced on the lawns. (2009)

Page detail from Looking only for you. (2009)

Page detail from I chanced upon the unexpected and I found I liked it. (2009)

Until next time, G

(For additional views of the same, swing by elsewhere (Louise) and high up in the trees (Gracia).)

Guest bloggers: Gracia & Louise

To coincide with their current exhibition (A key to help make your own world visible, gallery 2), CLOG has enlisted fabulous duo Gracia Haby and Louise Jennison as very special guest bloggers.

Over the course of the next few weeks till the exhibition's close on Saturday 28 November, Gracia and Louise will be popping up intermittently on CLOG with posts covering anything and everything that inspires these lovely ladies.

They'll be posting once a week on a random day, so keep checking back with us!

PS. Craft Victoria will be closed on Monday and Tuesday and we'll be back on Wednesday. Don't miss us too much...

A word from Gracia and Louise

Something mighty peculiar was afoot but I was hard-pressed to say for certain what it was II (left) and I (right)

Guidance for those curious,

A key to help make your own world visible is an amalgam of sentiment and prose pulled from the pages of Hermann Hesse’s novel Der Steppenwolf (1927).

Spoken in warm voice by Pablo to Harry: ‘I can throw open to you no picture-gallery but your own soul. All I can give you is the opportunity, the impulse, the key. I help you to make your own world visible. That is all.’ [1]

From such we took impulse and created a series of other worlds that lie hidden, other interior worlds viewed with twin ‘gleam of pain and beauty that comes from things past’.[2]

Often our work, be that created individually or a piece worked on collaboratively, is dotted with fragmented keepsakes, and that is especially true of the work we have created for this exhibition. A sense of nostalgia is never far from frame, but ‘nostalgia is not always about the past; it can be retrospective but also prospective’.[3] It can cast also a sideways glance and be likened to unrequited love: ideal, unreciprocated and satisfying. In so far as memory is concerned, it should not be relied upon.

Nostalgia comes as a word from ‘nostos’—return home, and ‘algia’—longing (or pain). Its roots, in word, are Greek, and it ‘seduces rather than convinces’[4], something which greatly appeals to us both for we like to work in riddles and puzzles, and what could be more puzzling than something as hard to pin into place as seduction?

The inner landscape and the greater literal world, the geography we map charts longing, and fragility is revealed along the way. But be forewarned, it is oft a pathway littered with red herrings. Our keepsakes, these objects gathered, perhaps they are not all they appear at first cursory glance. Perhaps these objects take, as Jean Cocteau once mused, ‘advantage of our habit of believing them to be immobile.’[5]

Shell masks from Manfredo Settala’s (1600–1680) own cabinet of curiosities, a 16th century German automation of Neptune seated upon a tortoise, and an owl in gold, enamel, agate and diamonds made in Dresden before 1718 have been both collected and drawn, and appear now alongside carvings displayed during yam harvest rituals in Papua New Guinea from the Masco Collection of Oceanic Art. Calling to mind a wonder cabinet of curious, they serve to bring together ‘liminal objects (suspended between art and nature, death and life) …investing them with new value, new power, new meaning.’[6] Yes, for you, we have, with brush and watercolour pigment, and scissors and paper as our primary tools, created both collections of curious and other worlds.

As you wander, let the words of the poet Joseph Brodsky guide you: “you cannot step twice on the same asphalt.” [7]

Travel well,
Gracia & Louise




[1] Hermann Hess, Der Steppenwolf (Australia: Penguin Group, 2009) 204.
[2] Ibid., 186.
[3] Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xvi.
[4] Ibid., 13.
[5] Jean Cocteau, Beauty and the Beast: Diary of a Film (New York: Dover Publications), 101.
[6] Patrick Mauries, Cabinets of Curiosities (London: Thames & Hudson, 2002) 119.
[7] Solomon Volkov, Conversations with Joseph Brodsky (New York: The Free Press, 1998), 286.


Gracia and Louise's exhibition A key to make your own world visible is in Gallery 2 and is on until Saturday 28 November.

Opening night!

Our penultimate round of exhibitions for the year features three very diverse mediums ranging from our in-house curated exhibition Shoe Show's selection of six Melbourne-based emerging shoemakers, to collaborative duo Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison's delicate works on paper and artist books, to Karin Findeis' reflection on the practice of collecting via jewellery.

Opening to a welcoming throng of friends, family and fans, Thursday's opening was a blast! We hope you had fun too and thank you for coming. To view more pictures from the night, click here.

Shoe Show, A Key To Make Your Own World Visible and sampler are on until Saturday 28 November.

Photography by Esther Van Doornum

Thanks Michi!

Gracia and Louise painted the bird picture above my desk. Not only is it beautiful, it's also sentimental - it was the first piece of art I bought for my office. Nothing distracts the eye from a cheap Ikea table than a beautiful piece of art, especially one from these talented girls. Their show is opening tomorrow night at Craft Victoria. See you there. I'll be the one with big blue Ikea bag.

Gracia Haby and Louise Jennison's exhibition in Gallery 2 entitled A Key to Help Make Your Own World Visible opens tomorrow at 6pm, with artist talks commencing at 5.30pm

Introducing... Hammer + Daisy

Using paper as our primary medium, we make limited edition artists' books, lithographic offset prints, zines and the like, together, and have been doing so for many years now. Based in Melbourne, we work from home, and we are often to be found up late tinkering on some project.

Paper may be their primary medium, but these ladies sure are adept in doing all that they do! To coincide with our latest enCOUNTER display, this week CLOG looks at collaborative act Hammer and Daisy a.k.a. Gracia Haby and Louise Jennison. You might recognise their work which is stocked extensively in the shop, namely their bound journals and notebooks, greeting cards, softies and little owl pin cushions. What you might not know is that all these works are the created by the team effort that is Gracia and Louise! Incredible.

Not only are these ladies talented, but eloquent as well. We'll stop gabbing about how amazing Gracia and Louise are, and let them speak for themselves. Happy reading!

The titles of your work are whimsical and carefully constructed. How do you come up with them and is there a particular reason for this inclination?
Thank-you, we are rather chuffed you think so. Titles, be they for an exhibition or a particular collage seem to spring forth of their own accord. They can be coaxed out of their hiding spot somewhere in the chambers of the mind by the irresistible lure of a quiet room, an early morning or a late night. They are less cooperative around midday and think only of lunch at such times. Titles take shape whilst a work is being made. A postcard collage, a collaborative collage piece or a folded sequence in a concertina book, as one works titles leap forward and present themselves. It is then a matter of quickly penning the sentence to paper before it heads slightly, teasingly out of reach.

Titles are another area to play with, for us. Just as the two-dimensional surface is a delight to use, so to is the space allocated for a string of words with questionable punctuation. It also serves as an entry point for some folk, but do be careful… there are many red herrings lying about.

In the case of this display in the fine windows of Craft Victoria, the title All the things to take to our very own archipelago came after the once-broken chair was sourced in Elwood and before the black trunk was commandeered. Once we had title in place, the final trimmings were sought. That said we’ve neglected to include a few things we might actually take with us. Whatever shall we do for coffee and chocolate? We hope there are cocoa beans in ready supply.

Tell us a bit about your stint in Switzerland where you learnt the art of bookbinding.
We learned several bookbinding techniques in Ascona, Switzerland. In a delightful building near to a lake, at a quiet time of year, we were introduced by Daniel E. Kelm to the various tools of the trade. Prior to this we had little knowledge of a bone folder and a means to ensure square covers. It really was a case of diving in blindfolded and liking what we found. The exacting and beautiful techniques of those working and studying there was impressive and inspiring. They were also most welcoming.

Do you have a preference for any one of the many wonderful things that you make?
Initially, we’d have to say that our preference is always for our artwork be it collaborative or our own work. Making collages, watercolour drawings and tinkering on the page layout of an artists’ book side-by-side is what we love to do. However, thinking about it some more, we like all the various things because they are all the various things. Finding pearly buttons to use as eyes for an owl pinnie, well, that is also fun. Toggling back and forth between the two probably keeps us closer to sanity and of course, one feeds into the other.

What's the best thing about doing what you do?
Hmm, so many things. Today, it is the flexible hours that we can work and that we can, for the most part, work at home. Our studio for it all is our entire house. Prints are editioned on a glass cabinet in the middle room and every flat surface is put to use, even the floor.

...and the worst thing?
Working from home can sometimes have a few pitfalls. Hand-in-hand with the good, it does mean that you never quite switch off.

And finally, you're on your way to your very own archipelago and you can only bring 3 things. What would they be?
Only three, you say? Hmm, that shall be tough. We’d want something for a caffeinated high (be it chocolate or coffee in form… but, please, on second thoughts, don’t give us the raw source material, we’re woeful in the kitchen). We’d want something to read lest we’d go mad. And, we’d want sunscreen for we are pale and indoorsy.