Axon: Creative Explorations

This hybrid critical/creative paper addresses ekphrasis in an age characterised by short attention spans. It suggests that while ekphrasis is generally considered as arising from a poet’s close attention to an artwork -- the product of what psychologist Daniel Kahneman terms System 2 perceptions thatrequire time -- and can in turn prompt the reader to return to an artwork with heightened attention, it can also represent the fleeting glimpse that characterises much of our sensory experience of the world around us and, indeed, art. Considering Owen Bullock’s idea of ‘radical ekphrasis’ in relation to Kahneman’s category of System 1 perceptions – that is, immediate response to stimuli -- this paper explores the possibilities of an ekphrasis of the transitory and concludes with an example thereof.

This paper presents the findings of a case study designed to understand more about materials, methods and themes of Australian artists’ books and their preservation issues in collections. Artists use a huge diversity of materials and methods in the creation of artists’ books, which might make these books difficult to preserve in a library or gallery collection context. Based on interviews with five prominent Australian book artists, collectors and curators, this paper suggests that artists choose materials that reflect or express the artistic, social, and political themes of their work, as well as the long historical traditions of bookbinding, printmaking, printing, typography etc, that their work continues. However, the interviewees were also very engaged in the issues of collecting, curating, and preserving these materials. The findings of this study confirm that access to archived information about the artist’s themes, intention, and working methods would be invaluable for all aspects of collection management. Thus, there is a need to have a coherent written policies to set rules for what to include or exclude from an artists’ books policy in libraries and art collections in Australia.

In this paper I will argue the value to be found in the visual analysis of text, drawing upon the artists’ books of Czech-born Australian artist Petr Herel (1943–2022) as case study. A seminal figure in the development and dissemination of the artist’s book in Australia, the complexity of Herel’s work lies in part through his use of text that conveys meaning without necessarily being conventionally ‘read’. This paper takes concepts rooted in traditional and conventionally rigid semiotic frameworks,including the relationship between text and context and the polysemy of meaning, and applies them in a flexible and contemporary approach that facilitates new visual analyses of the text present in Herel’s books. The artist’s use of unfamiliar alphabets, familiar alphabets and unknowable alphabets calls for a new iteration of analysis that encourages and celebrates visual meaning(s) from text.

This paper interrogates the common threads between protest literature and banner sculptural poetry, while it also explores alternative forms that protest banners take and the way that these communicate with ideas surrounding ecological and social justice. Overall, it seeks to theorise and map contemporary sculptural poetries produced by women in the UK and beyond and, in the process, to provide an up-to-date account of this mode, not only from a critical angle but from a creative angle as well. The paper starts with considering poetry in banner form as a prominent element of protest with relevant work by Thalia Campbell and Maggie O’Sullivan, and then considering wearable art by Rachel Fallon as a dynamic and multisensory praxis. These materials and more are blended with relevant secondary literature review and creative responses. The textual banners presented here showcase innovative poetry’s potential to destabilise canons, reconfigure, and restitch our social and ecological stratification.

Georges Perec’s postcards were first published in the French magazine Le FOU parle, in 1978. They were not postcards at all, just the written messages, and far from their description ‘en Couleurs Véritables’ (in Real Colour), they were entirely in black and white. The Postcards for Perec mail art project responded to Perec’s 243 imaginary postcard messages by creating the missing images as real postcards.

This essay defines the poetic form of the calligramme (also known as the pattern poem, or technopaignia), provides a micro-history of the form in Western literature, before exploring how, with reference to Apollinaire’s Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War (1913-1916) and Foucault’s This Is Not a Pipe, the poems in Object Permanence: Calligrammes (Puncher & Wattmann/Thorny Devil Press 2022) took shape. It also explores how, via Goethe, the calligrammes use colour, and why, via Piaget, their taking shape is a kind of poetic object permanence.

Our first COVID-19 winter was a time riven by doubt, suffering and existential uncertainty. For many, those experiences hampered, at least initially, our creative inclinations. However, with the benefit of hindsight, the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic have come to be associated with unexpected creativity. For me, a routine of visitation, documentation and mixed-media making provided a creative outlet to try and make some sense of the mass disruption we faced.

Place, it has been said, is a site of self-identification (Gibson, 2015c) and where meaning is made (Plumwood, 2008) and so it was for me. Each day of that arduously uncertain first COVID-19 winter, all ninety-two of them, I visited Cape Paterson’s Bay Beach, an unpredictably beautiful and endearing parochial place on Australia’s southeast coastline. Using a routine guided by respectful visitation (Muecke, 2008) and aesthetic noticing (Brasier, 2017), I scribbled notes and took Polaroid photographs to document different aspects of that personally significant place. Heeding Ann Hamilton’s (2010) call to work from what you know but also what you don’t know, it was a routine that embraced ambiguity, imprecision and the affordances offered within mixed-form making methods.

The resultant work, ‘92 days of winter: swimming, walking and watching’, encompasses lyrical mixedmedia amalgamations chronicling a particular place, its character, and its indifference to a time of immense disruption. This essay offers a self-reflexive examination of how uncertainty, imperfection and hybrid making practices can offer affecting creative prompts when interrogating the complex, intimate and contested nature of personally significant places.

Taking individual and self-contained production of hand printed books as a case study, this paper explores if a close reading of an art object – an artist book – and the solitary work and practice of a studio artist could be a model for less jangly relations with a turbulent world. The role of artist agency is discussed via a close examination of the decision-making process of creative visual art production, drawing on the works of Agnes Martin as exemplar.