Feature Artist - Julie Macbean

Feature Artist: Julie Macbean

Julie Macbean is a painter-printmaker living in Darlington, UK.  Graduating with an MA in Fine Art from Teeside University in 2012, she is inspired by nostalgia and historical events; looking for the undesirable and the overlooked.

Julie's submission for the Personal Histories Exhibition 'Absent Voices' is based around Marianne Hirsh's 'Postmemory' and alludes to the inherited memories passed down from the generation before, bringing absent voices to life (especially pertinent at this time of year when we remember absent friends).

The images and intriguing snippets were found during a house clearance for a family member; and the book was put together by talking to family members and through internet research.

'Absent Voices' is a beautifully bound linen box of ephemera; containing hand printed and facsimile photographs on both loose and bound pages. Scrolls and facsimile vintage postcards housed in nooks and pockets make this a very interactive and interesting addition to the Personal Histories exhibition. 

'Postmemory is not the recalling of a person's memory; it describes the relationship that the "generation after" bears to the personal collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before.

To be dominated by narratives that preceded one's birth or one's consciousness, is to grow up with overwhelming inherited memories, remembering only by means of stories and images.

These events happened in the past, but heir effects continue into the present."

Marianne Hirsch

www.postmemory.net

ALL IMAGES COPYRIGHT OF THE ARTIST - JULIE MACBEAN

Feature Artist: Dana LeMoine

Dana LeMoine

is an artist and teacher from Minneapolis, USA,

working in printmaking, paper making, bookmaking, drawing and collage.  

Dana was born and raised in Wisconsin and earned her Master of Fine Arts-Printmaking from Arizona State University and  her Bachelor of Fine Arts (Emphasis on Printmaking) from the University of Wisconsin.  She is currently Education and Community Programs Manager at the Highpoint Centre for Printmaking, Minneapolis.

Dana's submission for the Personal Histories exhibition is 

December 24, 1443 East Harriet Street

"It is an exploration of my family on Christmas Eve through many years.  It looks at how we treat this holiday very different from the rest of the year, even though many of us do not believe in the holiday itself.  I am unsure of how Christmas traditions began in our family, but I believe they need to be examined in order to understand how our family can make positive changes in the future."

The book is printed using Xerox transfers, screen printing and letterpress.  It is a variant edition of 10 with each version hand-bound in different fabric.

Dana's artworks show a continuing interest and exploration of family history and interpersonal relationships which extends across her drawing/collage, printmaking and bookmaking practises.

ALL IMAGES COPYRIGHT OF THE ARTIST - DANA LEMOINE

Feature Artist - AMY PIRKLE

AMY PIRKLE

is a book artist and letterpress printer from Tuscaloosa, Alabama. 

Amy received her M.F.A. in Book Arts from the University of Alabama in 2007.  During her time in graduate school, she established Perkolator Press.  As a printer and book artist, her primary medium is letterpress and reduction relief, but she often employs other printmaking techniques as well.  Although her work stems from long-standing craft tradition of fine press and fine binding, she also enjoys integrating newer forms of technology into her books.  Familial relationships and memory are the major inspirations for her work.

A REAL FIGHTING MAN (2012)
is Amy's submission work for Personal Histories.

I printed A REAL FIGHTING MAN after spending a few days with my grandfather in south Georgia and looking through some snapshots of him serving in Korea in the early 1950's.  The photos instantly inspired me, mostly because of the descriptions my grandfather had written on the backs of the photos, including the phrase "A real fighting man".  The cover images are reduction linocuts based on two of these snapshots, while the spine image and flags are archival inkjet prints.  I created photopolymer plates of his cursive handwriting from the photos, and letterpress printed them along with a narrative he wrote about his time in Korea 50 years later.  The book attempts to convey my grandfather's struggle to regain a sense of normalcy after facing the horrors of war.

Kiyoko

Amy has enjoyed an active exhibition record and her work resides in Permanent Special Collections in almost 50 universities across the United States including the Art Institute of Chicago, Brown, RISD, Vanderbilt and Yale.  Amy currently teaches book arts, drawing, and design at The University of Alabama for the Department of Art, University Honors, and New College.

When You Are Old

The River

ALL IMAGES COPYRIGHT OF THE ARTIST - AMY PIRKLE

Feature Artist - TIM LAURIN

TIM LAURIN

is a master printmaker from Ontario, Canada.

Working from his self renovated Octopus Studio Press site which, in a former life, was the one room 1938 Tyrone School, Tim skilfully combines new and old technologies to create absorbing artworks.

Originally trained as a fine craftsman working in metal and glass, Tim found himself drawn to the media of printmaking around 15 years ago.  Since then he has focused on alternative approaches to intaglio, which often incorporates photo-based sources.  Tim also began exploring the medium of Letterpress printing in 2008 working on a Vandercook Proofing Press #1 and an SP-15. 

The bookwork titled, Masc-U-line, is an exploration of self-identity and the social perception of masculinity.  Appropriating vintage photographs, I combine my photo types with short verse, using lead type in a traditional letterpress format.

The book, Some Men I Know, is a collection of ten portraits.  New technologies such as the internet and smart phones have dramatically changed how I interact with people.  Much of my socializing is now mediated through mobile apps on a 2 by 3 inch screen.  

This series of dry points is directly drawn from the photo-profiles of my acquaintances and have been created  using traditional techniques of drypoint and spit-bite etching. By using the screen capture function on my phone, I save the profile pic of my guy-pals and then begin scratching their likeness into a metal plate.  The result is a tiny print on Japanese washi tissue that is also laminated onto BFK cotton paper (chine colle)

ALL IMAGES COPYRIGHT OF THE ARTIST TIMOTHY LAURIN  

Feature Artist - JENNY HOAK

JENNY HOAK

is an artist born and raised in Boise, Idaho, USA and has resided there for thirty years.  She is currently teaching in her fourth year at the Cooperative Preschool in downtown Boise.  Jenny is a senior at Boise State University and will graduate this coming December.  She is a dual BFA major in Art Education and Visual Arts, and is also pursuing a minor in Spanish.  Jenny explores a variety of printmaking processes within her work, and has recently been exploring the possibilities of intaglio etching and screenprint.

Jenny's submission for the Personal Histories exhibition is entitled "Meet Me There", an accordion fold format book with etchings, screen print and cut outs.

"Dreams serve as pathways to other worlds that blur the boundary between the real and the imaginative.  My subconscious is easily manipulated by my interaction with painful memories and family documents.  As a child, the influence of these experiences led to nightmares, but as an adult my journey has been much different.  Now I encounter spaces where my feelings of sadness and grief transform into sceneries of peace, contentment and harmony.

Recreating my dreams is an essential element of my grieving and my work.  The process of etching is therapeutic  for me as I peel away more of a memory and reveal one more layer of myself.  "Meet Me There" is inspired by unresolved emotions surrounding events from my childhood.  The etchings reflect the diverse dream-like worlds I encounter when searching for my father and are a direct response to the grief I feel regarding his physical absence."

ALL IMAGES COPYRIGHT OF THE ARTIST JENNY HOAK

Feature Artist - VERONICA CALARCO

VERONICA CALARCO

comes from a small town in East Gippsland, Victoria, Australia.

She is currently living in a small village in north Wales.

Veronica completed a degree in printmaking and a postgraduate in weaving at the Institute of the Arts, Australian National University in the early 1990's.  She employs drawing, printmaking, weaving and references to language in her works.

On leaving university Veronica worked as a community artist in the Australian Capital Territory with organisations such as Megalo Access Arts (open access printmaking), the Multicultural Arts, DADA (Disability and Disadvantage in the Arts) and Art Monthly Australia.  In 2002 she moved to Halls Creek in the Kimberleys, Western Australia to work in the Kimberley Language Resource Centre and write Art Notes for Art Monthly Australia.  She headed to Alice Springs to manage an arts disability project Mapping New Territory and then to run Jukurrpa Arts Centre (an Aboriginal women's art centre).  

Since 2004 she has been living between Wales and Australia, completing artist residencies - Parliament House (ACT), Thirning Villa (Sydney), The Regional Print Centre (Wales), Weaving in Norway, Grindells Hut (Flinders Ranges SA), Cill Railaig (Ireland) and exhibiting in Japan, China, Korea, Turkey, Wales, England, Ireland, Spain and Australia.  

Veronica last year received an A level in Welsh and has recently opened Stiwdiomaelor,

an artists' retreat in the north of Wales, which seeks to be self-funding and non-profit.

Kurnai Welsh Dictionary

is the work Veronica is including in the Personal Histories exhibition.

This work has been completed in response to a sentence in Vanishing Voices (Nettle Romaine, pgs 178-9): "Grammars and dictionaries are artificial environments for languages.  They reflect only a fraction of the diversity of a language in its everyday use and cannot capture the ever-changing nature of language."

I decided to make a Kurnai Welsh dictionary to signify the loss of meaning, history, memory, knowledge and growth that occurs when a language becomes extinct or is rarely used.  In choosing the Welsh words to go with the Kurnai I didn't know if they had the same exact meaning as I have no context for the words.  With the visual images I didn't want them to be a direct representation of words, as I wanted to refer to the early use of images by colonists in Australia.  

When Australia was first settled, posters were attached to the trees for the Aboriginals with images setting out the laws of the white man, but of course the Aboriginals could not read the visual images as they were white man's images, not Aboriginal.  So the images in the dictionary are my visual translation of the words.  In the recording I wanted the Kurnai words to be recorded with a Welsh accent, because the sound of a language is important and something that is also lost in the ending of a language.

ALL IMAGES COPYRIGHT OF THE ARTIST - VERONICA CALARCO

The work is presented in a book format with a recording of the words by Alison Woodbridge (Welsh language tutor in the Dolgellau area).  A series of woodcuts are being made to go with the book.