Administration Officer at Accessible Arts

I've been AWOL from my blog as of late, and here's why:

In June I applied and received a position at Accessible Arts, an organisation who helps people with disability be fully included in arts and culture in NSW.

I've had contact with Accessible Arts in the past if you remember, John Demos' residency at the Big Fag Press, his solo exhibition at The Cross Art Projects including Josh Charles' beautiful doco, and the Supported Studio Network forum in which John and I were both panellists. I also attended a training day at Accessible Arts on Disability Awareness.

Anyway, I'm the Administration Officer and my role is largely database management, day to day bookkeeping with MYOB, and general administration. I am so grateful to be part of such a wonderful group of people, and it feels so rewarding to work towards a cause I believe is so important.

You can read the Accessible Arts July Newsletter in which I am introduced, and you can see me at the bottom of the staff information here

My colleague Jo Agius also welcomes me in her Auslan translation of the newsletter (at 5:24 - 5:40)

We've been learning a bit of Auslan (Australian Sign Language) at work, which I've found very interesting. I can say:

Hi, How are you? Welcome. My name is Louise. I'm 26. I live with my partner, Nathan, I like cats. I have one cat called Poppy. I am the administration person at Accessible Arts.

We've also learnt a host of other useful phases for use around work - things like, Are you busy? Can I help you? What time is the meeting? I forgot. I'm working on MYOB. This week, I'm learning the volunteer procedure. I am working on the database instructions. See you tomorrow. Have a good night/ weekend.

Our upcoming Arts Activated conference means we're also learning to give directions, like "turn left, go up the stairs/lift to the registration desk on level 2 in room 5."

As someone who speaks English, Polish and teaches French, I've found Auslan very interesting from a linguistic point of view. And some of my understanding of language sentence structures and tenses has actually been useful. I'm thinking about maybe taking an Auslan course, but I'm not sure if I have time.

Other Worlds Zine Fair

The Big Fag Press has decided to withdraw our participation in the Sydney Writer’s Festival MCA Zine fair this year. We will instead redirect our energy by taking part in an alternative event - the Other Worlds Zine Fair.

Our decision comes after much deliberation. We are opposed to the Abbott government's Operation Sovereign Borders scheme which violates refugee and human rights. The recent expanded involvement by MCA sponsor Transfield in offshore detention centres in Nauru and Manus Island is something we at Big Fag Press take a stand against.

The Big Fag Press does not wish to endorse an event which is supported by money raised from the mandatory detention of refugees.

We are hopeful that awareness raised, no matter how small, will have an effect on the conscience and opinions of everyday Australians, which will in turn eventuate in changes to federal discriminatory laws.

Please come along to this event and say hey to us. The facebook event is here. I am personally making a zine for sale and we're taking along a lot of our latest prints!

Audio available - Accessible Arts Supported Studio Network Forum

The audio from Supported Studio Networks: Possibility and Potential has just been released. If you want to read a previous blog post about the project, see this previous post of mine.

Artist John Demos and I are panellists at the beginning of this one, Building Culture, but you can find the rest of the audios on the Accessible Arts site.

Yeomans Exhibition and Field Trip

I posted previously about working on a project for Ian Milliss and Lucas Ihlein called the Yeomans Project, which has just finished exhibiting at the Art Gallery of NSW. I went there on Monday and finally got some decent photos of the exhibition just before it closed. I also went on a field trip to one of Yeomans' original farms organised as part of the public programs. Here are some of my photos from both:

I'm also working on transcribing the talks by Kirsten Bradley, Joanna Mendelssohn, Stuart Hill and Wendy Yeomans from the public programs. These will eventually be up on the Yeomans Project blog.

4 tonne tango!

We had our big moving day from Woolloomooloo to Glebe on Tuesday! The following photos give a pretty good idea of what that entailed.

And a quick montage I made of the day:

It'll probably be a month or so until we're settled into our new home. There's some brilliant old stories about the Glebe viaducts. It's lucky I don't believe in ghosts!

*All photos and footage are mine.

The Yeomans Project - Art Gallery of NSW

In 2011, I started working on printing a series of works by Lucas Ihlein and Ian Milliss for the Yeomans Project on the Big Fag Press which was to be exhibited at ACCA in Melbourne. You can see I wrote a post about it in my blog here. The prints went on to win the 2012 Fremantle Arts Centre Print Award.

Here is Lucas holding up one of the prints:

In the lead up to another Yeomans exhibition, this time at the Art Gallery of NSW, Lucas Ihlein and Ian Milliss asked me to assist them in some of the legwork for the show, mainly making up some posters, and designing a newspaper based on their research blog.

The Yeomans Project recognises the work of PA Yeomans, an Australian inventor who came up with what's known as the Keyline concepts in agriculture and farming. The AGNSW exhibition is interestingly retrospective, as a similar proposal for an exhibition was rejected in the 70s when the trustees felt that such work was not art. Just goes to show how the meaning of art has changed in the last 40 years!

The posters I designed were based on websites of other artists or artist groups who use agriculture, farming or food as the basis of their art practice: (f)route, Artist as Family, Milkwood Permaculture and Diego Bonetto (who is also a partner of the Big Fag Press).

An interesting off-topic note: When I did my short course on social media business marketing at Media School, (who have no particular association with art or agriculture), Milkwood Permaculture were their prime example of awesome social media marketing. Small world, huh?

Anyway, for the posters, I had to request high resolution images and names of fonts, and loosely put together information about each artists' practice in one poster for the exhibition. Here are some of my proof prints stuck to my hallway wall! (yes they look better in the art gallery).

And here are the posters in the gallery (and Diego next to his one). I keep meaning to get back to the AGNSW and take some better photos of the whole exhibition but I haven't had time! If you wanted to see some of Lucas' photos of the launch, they are here.

The University of Wollongong (where Lucas teaches Media & Arts) funded the production of a newspaper for the exhibition which was based on the Yeomans Project blog.

It was a great experience getting it printed at MPD in Alexandria. At the Big Fag we print one hand fed sheet at a time, one colour at a time, about 100 imprints a day, not to mention an hour of cleaning up. I've explained our process in more detail in this post from ages ago. For this newspaper, MPD were using their web press machine. Now, the big fag is big, but, this is a BIG machine:

These are the rolls of paper they use to feed through the machine:

And here are the first proofs I had to look at to see if the colours were all right. (This took a bit of time).

Then see all these knobs here? Apparently they change the balance of the ink somehow. So for example, when I said a page was looking too yellow, they could fix it for the next proofing.

Here is my contact at MPD, Eleanor holding up one of the plates they use in the machine. They don't look too much different to our Big Fag plates! And on the right is the big roll of paper being fed into the machine.

So, the Big Fag does about 100 imprints of one giant page a day, and that's just one colour... this web press machine does 15,000 copies of a full colour newspaper in 1 hour! Here are some videos of the newspaper being printed:

Amazing! I would love to know more about how the web press machine works, I think it's fascinating.

So, all this was great fun but a harrowing few weeks designing the posters and newspaper during the time I was working at Sculpture by the Sea. I'm really proud of the way it all looks though!

 Art Gallery of NSW advertising for the Yeomans Project

The AGNSW exhibition is on in the Contemporary Project Space until 27 January 2014. The newspapers are free at the exhibition, so please pick one up!

*All photos and videos are mine, unless captioned otherwise.

Runway Australian Experimental Art - goes LIVE

Runway is a niche artist run magazine of which I joined the management in February this year. We've been working all year on relaunching as a free, online journal rebranded as Runway Australian Experimental Art, and expanding our audience to an international readership in order to promote the work of Australian contemporary artists both at home and overseas.

I was elected secretary of the management board, was part of the website design subcommittee and have been running the social media platforms.

The website <http://runway.org.au/> goes live as I'm typing this in 27 minutes - I'm so excited!

Here is my board member profile page.

And here is a blog post I wrote for the news section regarding another project I've been working on.

And here is the launch poster if you'd like to come along. The Sydney launch is at Archive Space in Newtown at 6pm tomorrow.

John Demos at Big Fag (at The Cross Art Projects)

In this post I spoke about our Big Fag Press Residency with John Demos, a project organised through Accessible Arts.

The residency went very well. John got a lot of prints and experiments out of his budgeted printing days, and was thrilled to see the press in motion printing his work.

Kristina Tito and I applied on his behalf to NAVA for a small grant to pay for some promotional material and other odds and ends to fund John's exhibition at The Cross Art Projects.

I designed a small catalogue, which was printed on our friends in print The Rizzeria.

John Demos Catalogues, Photo Mine

You can "read" the catalogue here:

The exhibition gathered John some publicity, like on Two Thousand which I was pleased about. I spoke about the residency and the exhibition on Eastside Radio in an interview, and an article about the project, Finding a place in the artworld, by Lucas Ihlein was published in Realtime Arts Magazine.

Antitoxicus Toxic by John Demos, 2013. Photo Louise Anderson

Blue Light and Black Window by John Demos, 2013. Photo Louise Anderson

Exhibition at The Cross Art Projects, Kings Cross, 2013. Photo Lucas Ihlein

Exhibition at The Cross Art Projects, Kings Cross, 2013. Photo Lucas Ihlein

Josie Cavallaro, Accessible Arts. Photo Louise Anderson

Josie Cavallaro from Accessible Arts made a small speech about the project to open the exhibition. Unbeknown to anyone, John came along with his own little speech written out on a tiny piece of paper, to thank everyone for the opportunity. It was a very proud moment for me.

From the left: John Demos, Artist; Tim Barbarino, Big Fag Intern; Lucas Ihlein, Big Fag Partner; Kris Tito, John's liaison at Project Insideout; Louise Anderson (me), and Diego Bonetto, Big Fag Partner.

Josh Charles' beautiful documentary was screened in its entirety at the exhibition as well:


John Demos at the Big FAG Press from Josh Charles on Vimeo.

The project was part of a panel discussion at Accessible Arts on 6 November 2013, but that's a subject for a later post.

Sculpture by the Sea

You may have noticed I've been very quiet on here. The next 4 or 5 posts should definitely explain why!

I was very proud to get a 2 day/week internship at Sculpture by the Sea about 4 months ago, which quickly progressed into a full time paid load unexpectedly. So for the past 2 months or so, I've been Exhibition Assistant to the Exhibition Coordination team for the Bondi 2013 show. Along with my French HSC tutoring, and various other freelance commitments, it's been a very stressful couple of months.

My responsibilities in the office included data entry, organising the office move out to Bondi, liaising with artists, social media scheduling, phone and reception assistance, putting together volunteer and artist information packs, stock ordering, helping to write our e-news, redirecting our mail and helping to finalise details like sponsor logos, dimensions and images for our exhibition catalogue. I also used my Indesign skills to create lanyards and badges for all staff, artists and volunteers.

Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi exhibition catalogue cover

Once we moved out to Bondi, in addition to the above, I was organising and directing volunteers, distributing catering, assisting with general enquiries, directing traffic and parking, driving various visitors in our sponsored car, communicating with all staff and site crew via 2 way radios, conducting visitor surveys, counting crowds, liaising with our publicity team, and occasionally assisting in small urgent situations like injuries. Sydney had a tough day a couple of weeks ago with some very windy weather, and being on the coastline was a tricky situation.

One thing I was particularly responsible for was artist talks on the weekends. I contacted and scheduled the artists and ran the artist talks event, which included distributing posters and information, bringing all the necessary material and moving around feather banners, beanbags, A frames and signs.

Here are some images of artist Simon McGrath explaining his work Virtually Melted, which is a site specific work consisting of a smart phone application that makes the image of an iceberg appear above the water to recognise the effects of global warming. These photos are mine.

I kept meaning to get up super early and take some great sunrise photos, but the role was very tiring and I didn't manage to actually walk through and see all the sculptures until just before the end! Unfortunately with the sun setting in the west as it usually does, sunset photos weren't as spectacular as the ones I've seen of Sculpture by the Sea, Cottesloe, in Perth.

We've just finished the Bondi show, I fell in love with quite a few of the works (my taste generally leans towards the more contemporary ideas or to works which have a political or social concept behind them). 

Carole Purnelle and Nuno Maya, Plastic World

Mikaela Castledine, East of the Mulberry Tree - the Legend of the Ten Red Crows

Carl Billingsley, Red Center

Lucy Humphrey, Horizon

Qian Sihua, Bubble No.5

Phil Price, Snake

Chen Wenling, Rainbow

Mia Hamilton, French Knitting

Robert Hague, detail of Monument

Magarita Sampson, The Great Bondi Sharehouse

Coral Collective, Coral

Alison McDonald, Flow (2011)

Elyssa Sykes-Smith, A Shared Weight

Unfortunately I don't have photos of all my favourites. Here are some from our great photogs at the event:

Simone & Justin Drape, Room Without a View Photo: Clyde Yee

Jack Davis, A Force of Nature Photo: Jarrad Seng

Robert Barnstone, Once Removed Photo: Jarrad Seng

Tunni Kraus, Washed Up Photo: Clyde Yee

You can see some more day to day photos if you follow me on instagram.