Through a glass eye

A suite of eleven etchings and lithographs

To a bird call choir, we unclipped the wings and limbs of our Through a glass eye bird and marsupial prints in the Fitzroy Gardens and made like a succession of notes. Or, rather, perhaps we resembled signal persons transmitting messages through the positioning of our arms and prints as semaphore flags. Either way, with our Australian Print Workshop prints cradled and spun left and right, high and low, we documented them against the green so you might be able to determine their scale.

All of our APW prints are now available through our online store. It felt good to see our work with clear eyes and in a different context. That morning, as the sun came up, we sought to find beauty all around us.

Here, as tiled side by side, row by row, details of the prints as they appear below:
Contemplating marble, stucco, velvet, and gilding
On a perch of “cheval usure des dents”, chirping
In the Trianon theatre, before a forest set
Two views of a Gouldian finch
A little palace of pink marble and porphyry
At the Musée Fragonard d’Alfort
The grounds of the Château de Malmaison
Not a royal residence but a garrison fortress
Halfway around the world and back again
As additional ornamental statues at Bois-Préau
Grande Perspective in the memory of a swan

Looking back at what was last year and the year before that, things feel so utterly different. Now in the time of “resistance and repair” (Olivia Laing’s Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency), all art can and should shape the world. By “getting at something deeper”, art “makes plain inequalities” and in doing so offers forth new ways of being.

In hope, we live.

This work was produced with APW Printers at Australian Print Workshop, Melbourne, as part of Australian Print Workshop’s French Connections project curated by APW Director Anne Virgo OAM.

Image credit: Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison, The grounds of the Château de Malmaison (detail), Lithograph with hand-colouring. Image drawn directly on to the lithographic plates by the Artists and processed, proofed and printed in three colours from three plates, by APW Printer Martin King and hand-coloured by the Artists, at Australian Print Workshop, Melbourne, 2019.