Gun Hell

Gun Hell [Traitor], 2025
Sculptural work: letterpress forme and bullet casings on tray and print.
Matrix: 595w x 160d x 30h mm
Print (ink on yellowtrace): 650 x 250mm, unique.
Multiple graphite frottages in private collections

It’s been difficult to watch the media battle out old tropes about guns in Australia, having recently exhibited (with Melinda Louise Smith) about the historic failure of gun control after the Port Arthur shooting by the Liberals & Nationals. And especially so since the Bondi Beach tragedy blew everything into the front line again, with ‘startling’ new statistics about Australian gun ownership, even though recent research has been exploring John Howard’s failed legacy.

Melinda and I got a Creative Australia grant a few years ago to explore John Howard’s legacy via his parliamentary papers, which are in the process of being released every January, with the final papers coming out in 2028. Our collaboration is mostly based on Melinda’s National Archives research into the papers, and writing responsive poems, with me interpreting her visual poetry output into handset letterpress works on paper. But sometimes I’m motivated to take the letterpress a little further, and I did some research outside of the parliamentary papers which resulted in an artwork that has suddenly gained contemporary relevance, unfortunately.

As I said at the opening of our exhibition, ‘Corridors of Power’ (at the aptly-named M16 gallery, 2-26 October 2025), there are more semi-automatic weapons in Australia than ever before, many of them actually made and sold in Australia.

I thought about this a lot as I put together this particular work, ‘Gun Hell’, made from letterpress type. It is modelled on a photo of a semi-automatic rifle built in Tamworth, home of the Big Guitar. The three models that I looked at from that source are called ‘Rebel’, ‘Renegade’ and ‘Revolt’… you can argue that people like to feel safe, that people like to collect things, but those names are targeting a particular mindset, don’t you think?

It’s called Gun Hell: Traitor (and sometimes, because I’m terrible at remembering things, ‘Hell Gun’) because the pieces of metal type I used are what is called ‘hell type’: letters that have not been put away neatly, that linger in piles around the workshop and get mixed up or are broken. Most printers have a tin or tray of hell type, and often it gets chucked out or stored until it can be re-cast into clean, whole type. I don’t just have those, I also have old projects that worked the type so hard that it’s pretty much worn beyond belief, like my work with Angela Gardner, which has left me with lots of type to play with sculpturally.

Letterpress is set back to front because it’s a relief-printing process, which makes a negative matrix that reads positive (or front facing) when printed. That’s why the forme (locked-up type) and the print face different ways.

At the exhibition, I showed the forme and a single print, but on the final weekend I allowed people to make a frottage copy of the type. I’m going to replace the black ink print with a graphite ink print soon, and that set will be the final work.

The work’s title also refers to the scatter of brass bullet casings on the forme, some small, and one large one with the word ‘TRAITOR’ engraved on it. That’s what Howard’s gun-owner protestors said about him. But it’s true for all of us: if strong gun laws had been properly legislated, we wouldn’t be having so many problems now.

Melinda and I were trying to talk about the past in our exhibition, but suddenly it’s all happening again. The news is once again full of shootings, whether political or domestic, and it’s time that politicians and people got serious about curtailing gun ownership. No-one needs more than a couple of guns, and young people definitely don’t need to be owning them. No matter who holds the guns, these tragedies couldn’t happen without the guns being readily available.