PRATTLE, SCOOP, TREMBLING: A FLUTTER OF AUSTRALIAN BIRDS, 2017

LIMITED EDITIONARTISTS' BOOKS
Written By Gracia Louise
 

Printed edition.

 
 
 

Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison
Prattle, scoop, trembling: a flutter of Australian birds
2017

Artists’ book, printed edition
53 page, perfect bound artists’ book, with 31 Indigo Digital CMYK leaves and 22 Indigo Digital Black leaves on 160gsm Knight Smooth, bound in 332gsm Buffalo board with red foil title, and one of five hand-cut bird collage inserts (one design per book), 210mm x 175mm
Printed by Bambra
Edition of 100

 
 
 

We launched a Pozible campaign for preorder copies (and donations towards the printing costs) of a printed edition of Prattle, scoop, trembling: a flutter of Australian birds. The campaign closed at midnight on the last day of January, 2017. Nestled beneath #PrattleScoopTrembling (on instagram), see everything from the printing and binding phase to launch.

Thank-you to everyone who supported our campaign, and the making of this book, in both unique-state and printed edition guise.

Prattle, scoop, trembling was released into the wild from our stall at the 2017 NGV Melbourne Art Book Fair.

Prattle, scoop, trembling was one of seven books longlisted in the Best Designed Independent Book category on the Longlist for the 66th Australian Book Design Awards 2018.

Editions have been acquired by the National Library of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, State Library Victoria, University of Melbourne’s Baillieu Library, Monash University Library, and University of West England (UK).

 

WINGED WITHIN (IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE)
Crimson rosella (Platycercus elegans)
Eclectus parrot (Eclectus roratus)
Australian golden whistler (Pachycephala pectoralis)
Bennets cassowary (Casuarius bennetti)*
Superb fairy-wren (Malurus cyaneus)
Splendid fairy-wren (Malurus splendens)
Red-backed fairy-wren (Malurus melanocephalus)
White-winged fairy-wren (Malurus leucopterus)
Australian magpie (Cracticus tibicen)
Brown honeyeater (Lichmera indistincta)
Australian king-parrot (Alisterus scapularis)
Rainbow lorikeet (Trichoglossus moluccanus)
Little penguin (Eudyptula minor)
Emu (Dromaius novaehollandiae)
Crested pigeon (Ocyphaps lophotes)
Australian ringneck (Barnardius zonarius)
Budgerigar (Melopsittacus undulatus)
Painted buttonquail (Turnix varius)
Superb fruit dove (Ptilinopus superbus)
Rose-crowned fruit dove (Ptilinopus regina)
Cockatiel (Nymphicus hollandicus)
Magnificent riflebird (Ptiloris magnificus)
Greater painted-snipe (Rostratula benghalensis)
Australian pied oystercatcher (Haematopus longirostris)
Yellow-rumped thornbill (Acanthiza chrysorrhoa)
Laughing kookaburra (Dacelo novaeguineae)
Brown cuckoo-dove (Macropygia amboinensis)
Noisy pitta (Pitta versicolor)
Torresian imperial pigeon (Ducula spilorrhoa)
Diamond dove (Geopelia cuneata)
Grey shrikethrush (Colluricincla harmonica)
Southern cassowary (Casuarius casuarius)
Brown falcon (Falco berigora)
Wedge-tailed eagle (Aquila audax)

 
 
ARTISTS' BOOK: PRATTLE, SCOOP, TREMBLING: A FLUTTER OF AUSTRALIAN BIRDS
ARTISTS' BOOK: PRATTLE, SCOOP, TREMBLING: A FLUTTER OF AUSTRALIAN BIRDS
$70.00
 
 
 
 

Preface

First came the collage, followed by the drawings, and lastly the words, which bound it all together. Beneath the resting wing of a red Solander box, with inlaid collage, three components of a whole became a unique-state artists’ book. An artists’ book that we have since reproduced as the limited edition printed book you are holding in your hands.

Prattle, scoop, trembling: a flutter of Australian birds (2016) began in response to a series of cabinet cards acquired from a second-hand books and collectibles store. The original cards, we were told, had been a part of one woman’s fashion collection of photographic portraits of women and men in their finery. To split her collection of bustles and feathers seemed unfitting, and so, following the train of our previous artists’ book, Closer to Natural (2016), we decided to make a work where the collages played leader and set the composition for the drawings. A Painted buttonquail (Turnix varius) upon a garden plinth in the top left of a collage meant that it would need to be in the same spot within the drawing. And so the pencilled buttonquail appears contemplating crossing a stream to the foreground. Without the figure, the birds have more wing space, but they are still tethered by the rules set by the collage, and by the landscape they have been given.

Upon closer inspection, the Southern cassowary (Casuarius casuarius) appears to have a domestic garden setting for a backcloth. Closer to natural, but not quite, this wilderness is tame. As our pockets of wild grow smaller, how thoughtless, the human animal.

Cabinet cards, as the name suggests, were suitable for displaying upon the cabinet, and to ours, we’ve added new winged inhabitants. This time, our Salvaged Relatives are not in the borrowed threads of the Ballet Russes (Salvaged Relatives, editions I through III, 2014–2015), but with nature domesticated and brought indoors. From Superb fairy-wren (Malurus cyaneus) to Brown falcon (Falco berigora), the indoor garden resting in your palm is house-trained not fierce. The drawings, hand-painted with gold trim, were cut to the same size as their cabinet counterparts, right down to the last nick and irregularity.

Of all the cabinet cards featured, only two have the names of the sitters written on the reverse. The Laughing kookaburra (Dacelo novaeguineae) is accompanied by “Grandmother Mary and Grandfather Alfred Stillard,” and in capital letters on the back of the Southern cassowary collage it reads: “Mary, Kate, Susie Fellows & Clarrie Stillard (daughter of Mary).” The rest of the people are unknown.

Prattle, scoop, trembling: a flutter of Australian birds features 15 individual collages upon these cabinet cards, and 15 pencil drawings on Fabriano Artistico 640gsm traditional white, hotpress paper, chaperoned by words. It was created especially for the exhibition, Birds: Flight paths in Australian art, at Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Victoria (November 2016 – February 2017). On timber shelves for branches and upon an enlcosed plinth, it roosted alongside the collage, An index box of Australian birds still fluttering (2016), also housed in a matching red cloth Solander box with an inlaid drawing.

Also included in the exhibition, alongside John Lewin’s Squatter pigeons, and an ornately decorated emu egg, was our artists’ book, A Flight of Twelve Southern Hemisphere Birds (2013), and print, Underneath Soane’s ‘star-fish’ ceiling, the library at No. 12 proved anything but quiet (2016) (the original of which was created especially for the ‘Creating and Collecting: Artists’ Books in Australia’ issue of the State Library of Victoria’s La Trobe Journal (No. 95, March 2015), guest edited by Des Cowley, Robert Heather, and Anna Welch).

Prattle, scoop, trembling: a flutter of Australian birds, alongside Closer to Natural (featuring 13 collages on cartes de visite, and 13 pencil drawings on Fabriano Artistico 640gsm traditional white, hot-press paper), was acquired by Artspace Mackay, Queensland, in 2016.

We decided to make a limited edition (of 100) of this artists’ book to share with you, dear reader. It is your very own mischief of magpies, prattle of parrots, and trembling of finches for your bookshelf or bedside table. May it inspire you to take “much pleasure in watching the habits of birds.”[i]

Note:
[i] Charles Darwin in response to Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne wondered “why every gentleman did not become an ornithologist,” cited by Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 397.

Conclusion

Slowly, slowly, grow the trees. Connected below ground, and overhead, the “last remaining piece of Nature, right on our doorstep, where adventures are to be experienced and secrets discovered. And who knows, perhaps one day the language of trees will eventually be deciphered.”[i]

In answer “to that eternal question ‘Where shall we go?’ [Nature has] in fact supplied the best of all answers: through the woods. Shall we go?”[ii]

Humming, real, and interconnected: you. Me: an (armchair) observer of the natural occurrences. Lightly, trembling, fluttering, go, to a not so illusionary paradise, after all. Before it is silent, go. Outside, go. I shall.

Notes:
[i] Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate — Discoveries from a Secret World (Carlton: Black Inc., 2016), p. 245.

[ii] H. E. Bates, Through the Woods: The English Woodland — April to April (Dorset: Little Toller Books, 2011), p. 141.

 
 
Gracia Louise http://gracialouise.com
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