IMPRINT
Tall tales and antipodean adventures: narratives in contemporary
Australian printmaking
by Jazmina Cininas
Imprint magazine, volume 41, number 2, winter 2006
The collaborative team of Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison,
11 who have made the artist's book their signature medium, also
reserve their leading roles for extinct species. Their heroes' adventures
have a decidedly Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn flavour, even if the
rumours of their deaths have not been exaggerated. Pink-headed Ducks,
Giant Rice-rats and Bavarian Pine-voles sport prison stripes and plan
jail breaks in order to go fishing amongst desert cacti, while Robust
White-eyes play cards and Passenger Pigeons, drunk on alcohol soaked
grain, 12 attempt to hatch European Sea
Urchins.
The Agatha Christie inspired titles — The
Case of the Lost Aviary, Trouble
at Sea, The Dubious Clue,
By the Pricking of My Claws —
acknowledge Haby & Jennison's penchant for amateur detective work.
Unearthing incriminating evidence against commercial hunters, volcanoes
and ship-jumping black rats, 13 the artists
conjure new, pseudo-scientific scenarios, their slippery approach to
facts unfolding in whimsical narratives that operate according to their
own logic. The artists take liberties with the argument that 'narrative
metaphors are an indispensable part of all 'factual' discourse, whether
in history or in science', 14 and wink
at the commonly acknowledged notion that the historian's work is partly
scientific, partly artistic. 15
Haby & Jennison's truth is, by necessity, a fabrication, the species
themselves being lost for all time, at best leaving only fragmentary
data from which to glean information. Their Pig-Footed Bandicoots, Deer
Mice and Bulldog Rats are as fanciful as their names suggest, precariously
balancing sailing boats for headgear or fossils as body parts. As barely
intact as the last remaining specimen of the St Lucy Giant Rice-rat,
they threaten to fall apart at the merest touch. Extinct Cloud Runners
and White-footed Rabbit-rats croon their woes along with Memphis Slim,
drawing on another vehicle rich in narrative history, the blues lyric.
...
The printing process, as both a technical and artistic activity, has
been linked not only to the memory of human thought, but also to the
memorial process. Prints, in their various guises and mediums, have
played a pivotal role in recording the stories of our past, and continue
to document possibilities of what might yet become. The best narrative
printmakers employ printmaking's intrinsic properties and illustrative
traditions to create new fictions and expose new truths about ourselves,
celebrating the invention inherent in all knowledge, in all history.
An extract from Imprint by Jazmina Cininas, 2006
Imprint magazine
11.
Much of the following discussion of Haby & Jennison's work is essentially
a reworking of my earlier catalogue essay for Ex Libris at
RMIT Project Space, 2005.
12. This was used by trappers to make the birds easier
to catch. See below.
13. Information on the passenger pigeon and the rats
was supplied to the author by the artists, October 2005, citing Clive
Ponting, A Green History of the World, Penguin Books, 1992
and Tim Flannery & Peter Schouten, A Gap in Nature —
Discovering the World's Extinct Animals, Text Publishing Australia,
2001.
14. Donald N. McCloskey, cited in G.Thomas Tanselle,
Printing History and Other History, Studies in Bibliography,
Volume 48, 1995.
15. See G. M. Trevelyan, cited in ibid.
Gracia
Haby
Searching
for a way in
2009
postcard collage
