About
Every work, and each moment of the work, puts everything into question all over again…
Maurice Blanchot (1982 [1955]: 87)
Caren Florance
aka Ampersand Duck
Caren Florance works creatively with text and print in many different ways, but books remain close to her heart.
Dissatisfied with traditional publishing relationships, her PhD at the University of Canberra (2013–18) explored collaborative experiments with poets and poetics using a range of analogue and digital print processes. Her interests include:
- the history of the book and the contemporary role of the artist book
- Australian artist book history, with particular focus on the CSA Graphic Investigation Workshop (1978-98)
- print culture and its intersections with creative culture
- materiality in visual art and writing
- the influence of technical processes upon writing and visual expression
- print-performance and page-performance
- glitch, error and accident
- the intersection of analogue and digital processes
- how material processes can help with trauma recovery and dementia management
Caren’s teaching expertise is sited in book arts, text art and typography, visual poetry (vispo), and graphic design. She teaches her students to use the book form to augment their practice, not dominate it.
She works predominantly with relief printmaking, both press-based and hand-printed. Other forms of mark-making find its way into her work, particularly via revisitings of old technologies. Digital processes are increasingly of interest.
Ampersand Duck is an umbrella for many activities. It sometimes publishes in partnership with Recent Work Press.
Caren is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research (CCCR) at the University of Canberra.
She was for many years a sessional lecturer for the ANU School of Art & Design’s Printmedia & Drawing Workshop, and also lectured for Visual Communications, Heritage and Environment, and Creative Writing at the Faculty of Arts & Design, University of Canberra. Currently she is a Visual Arts/Writing Mentor for the ADF ARRTS program (Arts for Recovery, Resilience, Teamwork and Skills), run through University of Canberra.
She is a peer reviewer for the UK artist book journal The Blue Notebook (which is downloadable in PDF form). She is also an Accredited Professional Member of Craft ACT and a member of the Bibliographic Society of Australia & New Zealand. In 2024 she has an Honorary Fellowship at the National Library of Australia. In 2022 she was the Piscator Press Printer-in-Residence at the University of Sydney Fisher Library. In 2018 she was a Donald Horne Creative and Cultural Fellow at the University of Canberra and one of two Critics-in-Residence at ANCA Gallery, Canberra.
She currently lives in Bega, NSW, deep in the Yuin-Monaro Nations.
