ALT-SHIFT-PRINT: C/:Ovid
The Piscator Press Studio on level 1 of Uni of Sydney’s Fisher Library is a lovely place to spend time.
The little press at front right is mine, brought from home, as is the work on the walls in the right of the picture. The two gorgeous Albion presses belong to the university: the large one is the original Piscator Press, and the small one was rescued from being a library doorstop. Everything left of the Scummo! poster is residency work. If you stand at the glass and look out from the inside of the studio, you can see the exhibition vitrine, which I’ve filled with a selection of things that contextualise what I’m doing:
Since the last residency, the Library managed to successfully bid on some excellent large-scale metal type during the epic auctioning of the Melbourne Museum of Print collection. This was an important purchase because the studio can only be used with water-based printing ink, as there’s no proper ventilation for solvents. The new typefaces are wonderful.
I’ve been having a lot of fun, but today as I write this I’m sitting at home, at the end of a close-contact isolation week. This would have been the second-last day of my University of Sydney Piscator Press residency, but I’ve only managed to do four of the eight allotted weeks. I lost a week during the first Sydney ‘rain-bomb’ when it was too dangerous to move around the city and the house I’ve been living in at Katoomba had a major leak through a faulty door seal. I lost two weeks to a super-cold – the COVID when you’re not having COVID – which demanded a lot of bed time to recover. And then, after a lovely week of making, I have been caught up again in isolation. Happily the library has extended my stay for another two weeks, so hopefully after Easter I can finish off my projects.
Choosing COVID as a topic of residency consideration was, I think, wise. Even the delays play into the common experience of people worldwide as we try to carry on but encounter constant setbacks and interruptions. I spent the first week browsing the excellent book stacks of Fisher Library, settling into one of their desk-chairs to trawl through a pile of books. As a Classics student back in my early 20s, I loved classical literature like Homer and Ovid. For the last couple of years my eye has snagged on the Ovid in COVID, so I thought I’d revisit his Metamorphoses. There are a large number of translations in the university library, as you can imagine. I’m most interested in the upcoming release of a new feminist translation by Stephanie McCarter, but it’s not being released until September so not much good for this project. In any case, none of the translations are actually useful in their literal sense. I’m drawn to Metamorphoses because it’s essentially a collection of stories about transformation as a reaction to some form of stress and duress. And that is what has been happening across the world for the last 2+ years. We’re suddenly in a fast-forward montage, with little chance to stop and take stock. Change is being pushed partly by necessity and partly by an urge to keep capitalism chugging (ironically, also denying the opportunity to actually transform rather than window-dress).
So I’m playing with two different projects, as usual. One is a risograph book project, which has been progressing steadily over the residency (and is able to be worked on at home too), to be printed by Pinch Press. I’ve been collating an ‘index’ of COVID experiences, partly from media articles and partly from social media and personal experiences. When I showed it to a studio visitor, the reaction was ‘that’s a bit dark’, but as I pointed out, that’s because we’re still in the thick of it. I’m sitting, when I’m in the PP studio, amongst an amazing historical archive, but all they have to show for the past two years is a small online digital archive of COVID staff and student experiences. I’m hoping that my book will be of interest in 10, 20, 50 years time, providing an analogue record of our diverse experiences. Accompanying the text are some collages that I’ve been making, combining household objects with humans, trying to convey the feeling of fear and frustration in domestic isolation. They’ll be give a degree of separation from their original state by the risograph process.
The other project is just to play with the letterpress equipment in the Piscator Press studio. It’s great to have an Albion press at my convenience, because they are so flexible to work with, as long as you’re not really hung up on accurate imposition. I mean, if you set up the press bed and tympan properly, you can get excellent accuracy, but I’m not making intricate page work. I’m printing words and objects, like face masks and index cards.
Fun, eh. There’s lots more, and when I’m finished and everything makes a coherent body of work, I’ll put an entry on the front page of this site. I’m very grateful to the wonderful library staff, and especially to the Rare Books room, where they have let me sit and look through lots of interesting stuff. Hoping to do it again before I finish my time in the library!
