INTERVIEW FOR NOT PAPER
Gracia & Louise is a collaboration between Gracia Haby and Louise Jennison. Together, they create artists' book, prints, zines, postcard collages, and other small projects from their home-based studio in Melbourne, Australia. I am very pleased to bring you notpaper's very first collaborative interview, with slightly different questions based on creating art as a team.

Can you tell me a little bit about the collaboration/project?
We enjoy working side-by-side in collaboration. We each bring different things, different strengths and different ways of seeing, but we work so harmoniously together. It is an effortless collaboration; one we enjoy.

How long have you been collaborating, and what made you start?
We have been working collaboratively for almost ten years now and I guess you could say it officially began when we started working on our first series of limited edition artists’ books (in 1999). It all began with This morning I went into the garden, a small book bound in emu leather, featuring our collages and drawings and collected pieces of ephemera.

What do you like most about working with a partner?
It enables you to create something you could not otherwise create on your own. It is challenging. It is rewarding. It feels like the perfect fit.

What have you learned from collaboration and who/what did you learn it from?
That the possibilities are endless. It is also enjoyable to have someone to share things with, especially where exhibition openings and launches are concerned. We rather fell into our collaboration and seem unlikely to bring it to a close anytime soon.

If you could collaborate with anyone you wanted, who would it be?
Today, we’d collaborate with anyone, though especially a writer or someone who works with words.

Aprile Elich, 2008
Toronto, Canada

Not Paper


Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison
A noble second attempt
2008
from the artists' book And we stood alone in the nilent night