The two of us, and our self-built site

Presented as part of Art Enterprise Workshop for the School of Art, RMIT University

Friday 23rd August, 2024

If some of the below feels familiar, it may well be. We recently chatted about birds at Melbourne Museum, and various parts of our introduction and our thoughts behind our work will have overlapped.

A quick introduction for those of you who we have not met before. We met, here, at RMIT, in 1994, so our history is quite long, but in the interest of getting to the specifics and your questions — we love questions — we’ll zip along quick.

As our website tells you upon arrival, we have been collaborating since 1999, making artists’ books, zines, collages, stories, prints, and drawings. Besotted still, it appears, with paper for its adaptable, foldable, cut-able, concealable, revealing nature, using an armoury of play, the poetic and familiar too, with the intention of luring you into our A(rtists’ books) to Z(ines).

For us, above all, it is not the medium that is always of greatest import, but the message. And so, we use found photographs, collected postcards and acquired ‘scenery’ from institutions and collections (such as State Library Victoria, Melbourne Museum, NGV, and further afield) in our A to Z for what they can enable us to say, and what we hope you might in turn feel. Though, of course, what you feel is entirely up to you, and to this end we favour open endings above all. (In yesterday’s screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) of the Latvian animation, Flow, we were reminded of the importance of leaving open space for people to enter and feel their own way through. Where I felt a recognition of the intelligence of animals, other people around me read religious symbols in the heavens above the protagonists — a black cat, a capybara, a stork, a labrador, and a lemur — in a sailing boat, they saw as being Noah’s Ark. Others, based on their questions posed afterwards, saw the flood waters as a climate crisis film about our rising sea levels. Others, a blend of many. But I digress.)

Back to it. Clock’s ticking.

Upon last count, we have created 108 artists’ book titles, and released 147 zine titles.

Our work can be found in the collections of Art Gallery of Ballarat; Art Gallery of New South Wales; Latrobe Regional Gallery; Melbourne Museum; Melbourne University Library; Merri-bek Art Collection; Monash University Library; Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery; National Gallery of Australia; National Gallery of Victoria; National Library of Australia; Print Council of Australia; here, at the RMIT University Library; State Library of New South Wales; State Library Victoria; State Library of Queensland; Warrnambool Art Gallery; and even the Tate (UK). In various university collections in the UK and US too, spanning University of the West of England (UK) to the Environmental Design Library, Berkeley University of California (USA); Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections, Ohio University (USA); and private collections. (For the full list, see our site, she winked.)

Our work has been commissioned by Ace Hotel; The Australian Ballet; Australian Poetry; The Big Issue; Fjord Review; Genesis Baroque; Genevieve Lacey; Maroondah City Council; Melbourne Chamber Orchestra; Melbourne City of Literature; National Gallery of Victoria; State Library Victoria; and The World of Interiors. And to tie things to this morning’s theme, each and every commission sprung from our online presence. Many are now face-to-face friendships and links, but they all owe their origin to blogging or Instagram or the site. The Melbourne Chamber Orchestra commission, for one, a temptingly-worded email signature.

Based in Melbourne, visitors: Naarm, we work from home. Our collaboration is one based on harmony. We decided early on in our collaboration, through an organic process, not to polish the same skills. We naturally lent towards different things and now bring those different things together to make work not possible without the other. Working this way, a third work is made that belongs to us both. A work that we now share with others.

Representing nature for beauty’s sake alone is not something we are interested in, and, to us, it would feel like a continuation of the human tradition of taking from or treating nature as a resource. Art, as we all know, can advance social causes. It can help us question our perceptions and our disconnection to the environment or nature. On the precipice of extinction, it should make us think. Question our role, our footfall. Enable us to see something from the view of another vantage point, another species, another way of existing in the world.

As Ros Crisp comments about her dance practice opening a window, in our artists’ books, and all our work, we are trying to open a window, or a doorway, for the reader, or the viewer, to choose to leap, peer, or step through. Art is our way to inspire action. But we don’t want to beat the viewer about the brow with it; it’s up to them, to you. (And it is also something out of our control, how a work is experienced.)

As storytellers, reciprocating with nature is woven into all our work. Alongside our work, as of 2024, we are Tiny but Wild, a licensed wildlife shelter based, like our studio, in our home in North Fitzroy. After being foster carers for RSPCA Victoria, from 2017 though to 2021, and Grey-headed flying-fox carers for Bat Rescue Bayside, from 2020 through to last year, this next step seemed inevitable. And so, our ‘conservation’, giving-back work rubs alongside our giving-back art work. The two are not separate, for us, but a whole, together.

In 2023, we were commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria to create The remaking of things as part of Melbourne Now. We made a green pocket of restored eucalyptus forest habitat especially for the Grey-headed flying fox, collaged from 100 pieces in the collection of the NGV. A forest in which you could watch night turn to day and day turn to night as the light and sound changed. We created a 35-metre-long by 6-metre-high collage which was illuminated so that the scene transitioned from green mornings to nocturnal blues to represent 24-minutes compressed into 24-hours.

We piped collaged recordings from several Grey-headed flying fox colonies through the speakers so you could be immersed in a flying fox camp and in turn, hopefully, think about the interconnectedness of all life. The recordings featured colonies chiefly located in New South Wales, as these had less background noise and traffic; the colonies being more remote than our beloved Yarra Bend where you have GHFF right up against the freeway. You’ll hear a sea eagle fly through at one point, and mum and pup contact calls.

A major component of this work was the community involvement, including a collage activity in the centre of the space, where the audience could collage their own habitat for the Grey-headed flying fox. Alongside this activity, we held a week of zine-making workshops, panel discussions with NGOs and conservationists, in collaboration with the NGV Education Team. Because now, more than ever, connecting to our audience has become one of the main reasons to make.

Bracketed by light, our nocturnal artists’ book of 2022, was something of a love letter to animals, in particular, those we had cared for as wildlife carers; those whose very being we have been completely undone by. It was our salute to the living world, to those you have heard of and those perhaps you have not (a Little forest bat, a microbat, weighs between 3.5 to 6 grams).

And this is true of many of our artists’ books where we have moments of joy, rubbing alongside moments of error. Depicting, as the author Katherine Rundell describes, how in our hunger for the living world, we have cherished it and we have destroyed it. As with her work, our work is, we hope, a wooing. A bid, in so far that it has a purpose, to make us see: we already have everything we need. We, as in, all of us, have not historically been talented at identifying what is and is not treasure. Nature. Life. Biodiversity. This is treasure. We ‘make’ to make a difference. To engage with the audience, with you. We are all connected, and we are all the solutions. Which brings us neatly to websites and social media. Because this is how we have eked out a space of our own, and, not being represented by a gallery or similar, how other people have found us. And it is where we show the behind-the-scenes part of our work, alongside wildlife, alongside trial and error, and inspiration. In many ways, this, too, is a part of the work. Another entry point.

It has been a direct line for so many projects and opportunities. Blogging on High Up in the Trees led to writing about dance for Fjord Review for over 12 years and counting. Ripples in the Open, and our NGV interview on instagram during lockdown, was part of what led to our Melbourne Now commission. In the exciting twists and turns of life, we were then asked to submit a proposal of what we would like to make using the NGV collection. Based on our proposal, we were then offered a larger space. And then, following this, based on the scalability of our proposed work, we were offered the final space you saw earlier.

If we consult the Internet Archive Wayback Machine (three moments of which, pictured above), our site first makes an appearance on the 23rd of July, 2002. It is not our first version of our site, but it is quite close. The first version featured thumb prints for the different wings of the site. Each coloured oval disc was a link to a different, related page. In total, our site has been captured some 7400 times since then, with the most recent being the 16th of July this year. (High Up in the Trees, 31000, And while not everything is there in this process, for the main, it is. We can see what we made and when. We can see how we organised our site, what the focus was, and we can recall the technology at hand.

We built our first site not knowing much of how it hung together to make a series of pictures and floating words, but that we were fascinated and saw its value for telling our own story. Each being archivists, too, meant it held a particular appeal. We have always wanted a site we could grow into, flesh out, expand. One that made permanent the impermanent. Sites come and go, so we’ve always known we needed a record of all the small to big projects before things became a series of dead links to defunct sites. Our site houses near all. What it does not house, for that we had our blogs (Elsewhere from 2006 to 2015; High Up in the Trees from 2006 to 2016, both still publicly visible, before they morphed into Marginalia in 2016; joined by Flickr from 2006 to 2012, twitter from 2009 to 2023, you get the picture).

From the beginning, our tree site, or our mycelium network, was organised into branches. This is a structure near all follow, the idea of a tree from which things fork. Initially, we had Book Contents, Upcoming, Us, Past & Catalogues, and Links as the categories, and we manually moved things from Upcoming over to Past, and Book Contents had our first six artists books made between 2000 and 2001.

We manually built Next buttons, and the early days featured postage-stamp small file sizes. One incarnation of the site featured dotted frames around each image that we created in Photoshop, to give the illusion of two photos floating on the page and ringed by dots. It was an intensive way to create. Smoke and mirrors, and consistency being the hallmarks. We created the illusion of a masonry style tumble of images for the contents page, at one stage.

Later Zines as a category was made, because these photocopied affairs are just as important to us as that which is labelled an artists’ book, and an online shop was added. For the online store we used an oscommerce site that looked like the early days of internet banking and had to add warmth to make it less corporate. Working on the backscreen, we were able to make it look less cold, while keeping the functionality. We’ve always enjoyed working with code, changing a line here or there to alter a site-wide rule.

We built our early site using Dreamweaver. To make text appear neatly, on all browsers, we used nested tables within tables, for the days when the content was not responsive to window size, but fixed, and pages short and many. We’ve always made and run the site ourselves as we can afford to “pay” ourselves. But we’re also interested in how it works, and love adding CSS and code inject. We love adding a type with a file upload and the lines “font-family: Romie-regular; h1 {font-family: 'Romie-Regular';}”. A simple thing with big impact, which you currently see here, on Marginalia. It means we are on-hand to fix something when code goes wrong (after an update from Squarespace). It also means we update it regularly rather than at the end of the month or year. This keeps us engaged, which is the feeling we are hoping others have when they look through our site.

Some things have stayed the same, for better or worse, and so we’ve always included a welcome letter, a dear you, at the beginning. For example: “We make artists’ books, we make all sorts of things, and most usually we make things on paper. More often than not, we collaborate, and more often than not, we favour evenings over mornings. One of us favours collage and the other favours watercolour, and we enjoy being able to share our work with you here. From limited edition artists’ books to prints, zines, postcard collages and other small projects all created chiefly from our home-based studio, we hope you enjoy what you find here. Thank-you for stopping by. Do come again soon.” And introductions at the beginning of each wing, like this one for Artists’ Books in 2009: “On the page, a host of extinct animals and other companions await your gaze. Come and see what we’ve been up to of late and discover what it feels like to seek refuge in alien lands or to find oneself alone in a museum and yet woefully out of place.”

Looking back at the early incarnation of our site, clunky though some appears to us now, we feel a fondness for the site because we laboured over it and learnt. And every once in a while, we set about to overhauling the entire thing, because it is in need and because it is fun. Losing yourself to code, to plans, implemented, to documenting. It can be hard to look back. It can make you cringe, but the early projects are what have given rise to the newer ones, and better still, perhaps, the ones to come. It is akin to editing a work so that the idea or concept comes to the fore. It can bring clarity.

Today, our site is largely a fluid engine Squarespace creature. It features two blogs, one for Works (which fans out into the sections, Artists’ Books, Zines, and Works) and one for News. This means new projects grow in chronological order, and with tailored Related Posts, you can skip along the bottom in search of like. You can search by tag, and with CSS, you can shunt your tags from appearing at the bottom of the page, to nestling up near the top. A look at our Hemline series of artists’ books, shows you which collections have acquired the work, for example. In the heading above, you can choose to explore, by Category, Limited Edition, within Artists’ Books. You can search our A to Z, many, many ways.

This time next year, it may look quite different, but the guts will remain. The first projects will remain, because it is all part of our story. Life, art, wildlife, websites. It’s all one.

Inside the Square is a great resource for how to customise CSS (cascading style sheet), step by step, which covers how to make an animated vertical timeline, change mobile menu font size, adjust footer padding, customise anything from buttons to forms, create a multi-column dropdown menu, but there are so many. Find a resource that speaks to you, and remember to copy and paste, and date, your current code, so that if something you add goes haywire, you can whack the previous code back in and all is restored. It’s all smoke and mirrors.

Create a great 404 page (error page designated to be displayed when a request triggers the HTTP 404 response code). Australian Museum have a rather sweet one at the moment, which reveals the code that holds the images and words in place (though as we try to find it again, we cannot, which is rather apt). This is a great reminder to use every part of your online presence to convey who you are and what you are about. It is also a playful space.

Our Instagram and our site have been invaluable to us, personally, for we can make many small projects just for the fun of it. And this act of play and notion of sharing can sometimes yield something unexpected. It has been how we’ve always connected with other like-minded people, and it keeps us focussed and engaged. The digital space can be our own gallery. Our own entertainment, when used as a diary to document something we’ve seen or are thinking about. And as a means to share what we have made, because we want to communicate with other people. We want other people to think about how Grey-headed flying foxes pollinate our forests as we slumber. How frogs from one area can or can’t navigate to another, depending upon green corridors. We hope our work gives a sense that it is still worth it. A sense that, yes, there’s chaos, but larger than the world’s chaos are its miracles, and artists’ books or work that offer you a blueprint for what joy looks like, what a future looks like, what being reciprocal with nature means, this is what we are interested in. This applies also to social media for it ripples further than we could ever hope. And we apply the same attention to detail to it, in many ways.

The feedback we have received, so far, has been heartfelt and encouraging. This inspires us. And it encourages us to post authentically, and about things which are of particular interest to us. There are many ways to drive bigger numbers to your profile, but we have not followed such things as they’ve felt both hollow and unsustainable. We are interested in staying true to what we are truly interested in.

A SELECTION OF RESOURCES
Inside the Square free resource articles

Ghost Plugins
Includes easy to install free plugins

Squarespace Themes
Customize, Optimize and Grow your Squarespace store with easy-to-use plugins, integrations, and third-party templates

Beatrice Caraballo’s codebase
Great Squarespace tutorials, plugins, and snippets to help you customise your site

Public.Work
Domain imagery

Toooools.app
Low-fi image effects generator

khroma
Design with colours

meshgradient
Gradients for backgrounds

color.review
For accessibility

paletton.com
Colour palette combnations

fontshare
Typefaces

uncut.wtf
Currently features 162 typefaces

freefaces.gallery
Curated collection of typefaces that are available under a variety of free licences

We all have a list of things we can do on a personal level to make the world a better place: conserve water, consume less, lobby your politicians, eat less meat, change your superfund and banking to an ethical fund and bank, get involved in local planting and weeding days, preach to the choir to make the choir louder to make transformation possible, but this is a list of things we already know and already do. So, our artwork is our way of saying, here’s what we can do.

The subtext being, though we are not endangered yet, we are endangering ourselves as we endanger everything.

The takeaway being: go forth and make your own fabulous site!

Image credit: Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison, Bilateral Symmetry (detail), 2024, artists’ book.