A Visual Essay about the artist book Not Thinking about the Circus at the Circus is now available to download at https://axonjournal.com.au/issues/13-1 

 

 Gwenn Tasker and Angela Gardner, both part of the NightLadder Collective, went to a circus performance in 2015/6 at the Brisbane Powerhouse during which Gwenn drew and Angela wrote.  The performance was in the round so everything was happening at once and it was impossible to focus on one thing without losing sight of another. In 2021 Gwenn developed the drawings from that night using etching, relief printing and monoprint.  Angela added the poem Not Thinking About the Circus at the Circus (published Rochford Street Review, 2016 and the collection Some Sketchy Notes on Matter, Recent Work Press, 2020) in acrobatic sweeps following the movement of Gwenn's images using hand stamped letters. The format of the book - a very long concertina with additional tipped-in pages - echoes the sinuous, unconstrained movements and the simultaneous feel of a performance of physicality and playfulness.

Very excited that our artist book "Not Thinking About the Circus at the Circus" has been chosen for the Libris Artist Book Award 2022. Exhibition dates 9 April - 19 June 2022 at ArtsSpace Mackay. Proud to be part of this fabulous line-up chosen by judges Adele Outtridge and Brian Robinson.

Published by Shearsman in the UK. Very excited that the book has been chosen as a National Poetry Day selection 2021, has been reviewed in the Telegraph and now I've heard one of the poems will be included in the Forward Prize Anthology 2022!

See: shearsman-The-Sorry-Tale-of-the-Mignonette

New visual work from the Frans Masereel residency

A digital work from the 'weight of clouds' series. One of the discoveries from the residency was that by using digital files to create the lasercut cutting instruction they could then be used to play digitally with transparency, colour and layering. So printing with light before printing on paper. A monotype printed on Awagami silk white paper was collected by Frans Masereel Centrum, other prints in the edition have already gone to private collections in Belgium and U.S.A. Thanks to Arts Queensland and the Sunshine Coast Council for their RADF grant that allowed me to travel.

Some Sketchy Notes on Matter published

You'll find it here!  https://recentworkpress.com/product/some-sketchy-notes-on-matter/

You'll find a link below to a poem from my new book Some Sketchy Notes on Matter below...

		Susan Bianconi 25 April at 00:23
Auguri! Angela and thank you so very much--we're deeply gratified to have "Waiting for the Rain" for The Yale Review. https://yalereview.yale.edu/waiting-rain

Artist Book The Sorry Tale

Continuing my mission to bring poetry to audiences of visual art and Visual Art to readers of poetry

Two prints from the folio The Sorry Tale

The Australia Council funded project The Sorry Tale is taking shape as a script, a verse novel and now I have printed extracts onto sheets that will be part of a folio to be exhibited at the NightLadder Collective exhibition 'In the Works' at the Webb Gallery, QCA Brisbane in July 2019. The images are a combined print/drawing process taken from digitised slides taken by my seaman father in the 1960s and 1970s.

In Fiona Dempster's Letterpress studio printing extracts from The Sorry Tale

the title block for the artist book

Fiona adjusts her press

Proofing extracts from The Sorry Tale prior to adding to the already printed images

Views from the Writing Studio at KSP Writers Centre during a Published Authors Residency

There is a waterbowl for the birds outside Katharine Susannah Pritchard's writing cabin. I have seen 28 parrots, Wattlebirds and a Common Bronzewing Pigeon that have visited the garden during my residency.

The view from the writing desk with Perth on the horizon. It's been a very productive week with work done on my OzCo funded Verse Novel The Sorry Tale of the Mignonette

Moving Words at QAGOMA 14 April 2018 with the wonderful Jarad Bruinstroop, David Stavanger, Zenobia Frost, Theresa Creed, Nathan Shepherdson, Lionel Fogarty and Margie Cronin.  Our poems were signed by Melinda Busch from Deaf Services QLD. Writing and performing WITHOUT TITLE after Untitled Gordon Bennett 1991 has had an profound impact on me and I consider it to be a significant poem in my output. The commission for a longer work enabled me to think deeply about issues arising from colonialism in the painting that still affect Australia today and to engage with a number of senior Indigenous writers. Thanks to Queensland Poetry Festival, QAGOMA and the Commonwealth Games Festival for the commission.

you'll find a link to all the poems here

Notes to Architects

New poem online at Blackbox Manifold 

Australia Council Arts Project Grant awarded 2018 to research and write a Verse Novel

Huge thanks to the Australia Council for awarding me an Arts Project grant. This round saw strong outcomes for female artists, particularly in music, with 56% of grants awarded to women or groups including women. Next grant round for OzCo closes Tuesday 6 February for projects starting after 1 May 2018 so head to their website if you are interested in applying!

I'm off to the UK in September to start the research.

Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript 2018

Some Sketchy Notes on Matter shortlisted for the Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript 2018

from the Judges comments:
With a hovering intelligence and a laudable lack of ego, the beautifully controlled poems of ‘Some Sketchy Notes on Matter’ investigate the world with an ecstatic’s eye.

perth festival dorothy-hewett award 2018

NightLadder Collective Exhibition Connect-ed at Brisbane Institute of Art Oct 2017

Showing three of my works Thirteen Meditations on the Untranslatable, MAENAD: Manifesto, and Index. 

In all of my works in this exhibition I am interested in text and image and notions of manuscript. Each of the three works offers a different aspect of the relationship. INDEX is an artist Book handwritten in ink on double sided pages, however the form of the book (a concertina bookended by two Witches Stairs) deliberately makes it impossible to read the words. Maenad – MANIFESTO is an altered book, the first in the MAENAD series. It is deconstructed from its original form (Maquarie Dictionary) and repurposed so that the opened pages move from a reading as text (book) to its possibility as image (ink on paper displayed on a gallery wall). My selection of specific words offers a critique of the historical moment in which we are living. In Thirteen Mediations on the Untranslatable seriality offers a method to contemplate the temporal. The unique-state, bleed etchings are contemplative, enigmatic and uncontained, deliberately at a scale to draw the viewer in to personal encounter. The work consists of thirteen etchings and a thirteen stanza poem.

Thirteen Meditations,  published by Axon: Creative Explorations, materiality, creativity and material poetics (2018). https://www.axonjournal.com.au/issues/8-1/thirteen-meditations-untranslatable 

ABBE Artist Book Masterclass with Uta Schneider & Ulrike Stoltz

Participants discuss our work after a wonderful two day Masterclass in the QCA studios

Pleasure/Demolition by Caren Florance

The wonderful poet Owen Bullock singing my poetry in a public performance at East Space Gallery Canberra in March. The artwork is Pleasure/Demolition by Caren Florance using words from my Notes for Architects series. Pleasure Demolition was selected for exhibition in the 2017 Nonesuch Art Of Paper Awards exhibitions in Canada.

Working Papers a collaboration with Caren Florance

This project with artist Caren Florance saw me in her letterpress studio setting the type (stream of consciousness) for what would become the poem 'the future unimagine' published by Cordite. The blocks of typeset text were then worked on by Caren Florance, printed on Japanese paper and sent to me so that I could draw on the pages. This work was mentioned in the news of the print world (selected new editions) section of Art in Print (USA). Caren and I gave a paper on the collaboration "Unfolding to refold: collaborative wordings" at the ABBE conference in Brisbane July 2017. The artwork and the poem is also reproduced as a visual/poetry book published by Recent Works Press. This book and its ephemera has entered the collections of The National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum and The Poetry Library London. 

Definitely creating new audiences for Visual Art through Poetry and for Poetry through Visual Art.

Reading Spaces Exhibition East Space Gallery Canberra

Just back from Canberra where my collaborative poetry/printmaking project with artist Caren Florance Working Papers was being exhibited in the wonderful East Space Gallery. Also on show was her take Pleasure/Demolition on some of my poems from the Notes to Architects series. I got to do two readings while I was down there and attend the University of Canberra's Symposium on Poetry and the Artist Book.

Writer in Residence Canberra September 2019

Just heard that I will be Writer in Residence for the A.C.T. (Australian Capital Territory) in Canberra in September 2019.  

The Told World on display right next to Hardy & David Jones in Waterstones, Greenwich, UK!

Scape

Scape - a visual response to the poetry of Angela Gardner has been showing at the Brisbane Institute of Art. Really enjoy it when poetry enters galleries and visual art responds to poetry. The work shown by The Collective was sensitive, enquiring and thoughtful. It was wonderful to read my poetry to an enthusiastic crowd of gallery goers.

‘Last Flight’ artist book from the ‘Conflict in History’ Residency at Manly and Sheffield

Manly Library Artist’s Book Award, selected by Helen Cole & Steven Miller, Manly NSW 24 March to 12 April 2015
Now selected for 
5^th Sheffield International Artist Book Award – Bank Arts, Sheffield UK, Oct 2015
(This artist book was lost in-transit to the Sheffield and had to be withdrawn. Last known whereabouts Sheffield Post Office - isn't tracking marvellous - now I know where it is lost!)

Exhibition - The Spaces Between

artist book interference with Caren Florance at Brenda May Gallery

Small Publishers: Brenda May Gallery, Sydney from 17 Feb to 14 March, curated by Akky von Ogtropp. 

Artist Book 'Intention' part of ‘Conflict in History’ Residency

Intention uses a combination of text and image to commemorate the lives of refugees drowned at Christmas Island attempting to reach Australia by boat. As a migrant I have immigrated to Australia twice, the first as a boat arrival aboard the S.S. Strathnaver, and later as an independent adult through a migrant application arriving by air.

There is a foreground image, solvent release, of geometric lines taken from Arabic geometry, skewed and disrupted, that is reminiscent of map projection lines. The background image, of offset intaglio printed etching and relief printed lino does not project any narrative but is intended to convey the emptiness and scale of the ocean. There is a vast loneliness and undifferentiated sameness to open ocean, and in rough weather a profound terror.

The text of Intention, in handwritten pencil, was written as part of my ‘Conflict in History’ Residency for the Australian Historical Association and the University of Queensland’s School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classic and the UQ Art Museum in the second half of 2014. It was published in Thing & Unthing, Angela Gardner, Vagabond Press, Sydney 2014.

Both books 21 x 13.5 x 1.2 closed and 21 x 300 open

etching, linocut, solvent release, pencil on Moleskine Japanese Album

Artist Book Last Flight, part of the 'Conflict in History Residency'

Last Flight uses a combination of text and image to explore the plight of the dispossessed, in particular refugees from Middle-Eastern conflict zones. As a migrant I have immigrated to Australia twice, once as a child ten-pound-Pom, and later as an independent adult through a migrant application. Any complications in my identity due to dual nationality pale into insignificance in relation to the distress of those forced to leave their homes and flee.

The primary sources for the solvent release images are news feeds and the internet, which is how we as Australians become informed about this conflict. It should be noted, in a blurring of boundaries, that some of the images are from war games and aerial survey maps of Australian suburbs.

The explanatory text on the meaning of the word conflict has been put through an optical character recognition software and translated between pdf and word files. The process has garbled the meaning and changed the image to text, addressing central and ongoing themes in my work of the stability of identity and meaning, between text and image. The images have been over-printed with offset intaglio printed etching.

The text of Last Flight, in handwritten pencil, was written as part of my ‘Conflict in History’ Residency for the Australian Historical Association and the University of Queensland’s School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classic and the UQ Art Museum in the second half of 2014. It was published in Thing & Unthing, Angela Gardner, Vagabond Press, Sydney 2014.

Extract from my artist book 'A Quiet Voice' published in APJ

"I particularly enjoyed the pieces with colour, especially ‘A Quiet Voice’ by Australian artist and poet Angela Gardner. In ‘A Quiet Voice’—a stunning fusion of watercolour, origami and poetry—Gardner delicately uses space and silence as an additional form of expression, and catalyst, that swings the reader between reading and viewing."

rochford street review on the concrete issue of australian poetry journal

Launch dates announced for Vagabond Press Decibel series

Sunday November 30 (3:30 for 4pm) - Sydney launch of deciBels (with Skype link up) - Gleebooks

Sunday December 7 (1:30 for 2pm) - Vagabond Press Christmas Party: launch of Jess Wilkinson (Percy), Andy Carruthers (Axis) and Chris Edwards (Naptime) - Gleebooks

Wednesday December 10 (6 for 6:30pm?) - Melbourne launch ofdeciBels - The Alderman (TBC)

Friday December 12 (6 for 6:30pm?) - Melbourne launch of Percy and Axis - Grainger Museum

link to vagabondpress website and the decibel series

Artist in Residence for ‘Conflict in History’

Currenly AHA Artist in Residence  for ‘Conflict in History’ supported by UQ Art Museum/ HPRC.

CODEX Australia Melbourne 2014

light-trap press took part in CODEX in Melbourne 2014

Swung Weight Poetry Broadsheet

Huge thanks to Caren Florance of Ampersand Duck who gave me studio time and her clean hands while I typeset the poem Swung Weight in Garamond English 12 point with title in Castellar 24 point and clouds in random woodtype. Incredible fun as always, relaxed, intelligent, generous and skilled...oh and the music in the studio keeps everything moving. Swung Weight will be published in due course by Ampersand Duck.

Poems in Cordite

Cordite 36: Electronica is now online and available for your viewing pleasure at:

http://cordite.org.au/electronica/
Look out for my two poems "Animal Light" and "We Are Called"

I am currently working on a commission for The Red Room Company for their Clubs & Societies project. I will be reading at The Queensland Poetry Festival 27 August at 10.30am, Theatre Space Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts 420 Brunswick St, Fortitude Valley.

I will be reading at:
Readings Carlton
309 Lygon Street, Carlton VIC 3053 (03) 9347 6633 ‎
on 11 July 2011 at 6.30pm


Pages + Poetry is Readings Carlton's monthly poetry night. It happens on the second Monday night of the month and is curated by Melbourne poet, Luke Beesley.

There will be wine, and we start 630pm sharp ...myself and...

Petra White is a Melbourne poet. Her first book, The Incoming Tide, John Leonard Press (2007) was shortlisted for a Queensland Premier’s Prize. Her second book, The Simplified World (2010), was joint winner of the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry.

Jamie King-Holden lives in Geelong and studies literature at Deakin University. Her first book of poetry, 'Chemistry' was published by Whitmore press (2011). Jamie co-edits the literary zine 'Windmills.

Happily Ever After

altered book 'The Red Shoes/Dance of Death' on show at the John Paynter Gallery in Newcastle, NSW

Brisbane Floods

I flew into Brisbane on Sunday 9 January after three weeks in Britain. The pilot on our descent said the weather was not good. It wasn't raining as I got out of the terminal but the humidity hit me like a torpid wall. On Monday, I was just glad to be home. Jetlagged and needing to go to work early the next morning, I went to bed, unaware of the seven billion tonnes of water that had fallen in 72 hours...
to read more: London Review of Books.

Big Print in Canberra

Congratulations to Ampersand Duck and byrd for their work on Big Print. See images here. It is wonderful to see words from my Notes to Architects being used in the installation BIG PRINT, Megalo @ the Fitters Workshop, Kingston (Canberra ACT). Large scale printworks by 8 artists. Open 15-17 October 2010.