CONTRIBUTORS

Caren Florance

Caren Florance often works under the imprint Ampersand Duck. She is an artist/designer who focuses on the book and the printed word and uses traditional and contemporary processes to play with material poetics and poets. Dr Florance teaches across visual art and visual communications at the ANU School of Art & Design, University of Canberra (UC), and the National Art School (NAS).

Introduction to Caren Florance’s Lost in Case

BUY YOUR COPY HERE Caren Florance works in the Venn overlaps of text art, visual poetry and creative publishing. Her work is hard to pin down, principally because the artist herself is not interested in a static outcome. Much of …

Posted in INTRODUCTIONS | Tagged , ,

Caren Florance Reviews Dan Disney and John Warwicker

The book starts with a full stop. It orders me to stop before I begin. On the next page there is a font that looks like a zebra crossing. It straddles the page spread, white shapes on flat black. I stop, looking hard at the letters to make sense of them, and then realise what they’re saying: WALK WALK STOP! I’ve followed orders; how biddable of me. I move on, turning the page. There’s another black expanse: it says WALK in the same font, followed by a full stop. I guess I have permission to move on. So far, so good.

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged , ,

This is Not a Poetry Review: Self-publishing 101

Self-publishing has never been easier to do than now, yet it’s often spoken about in terms of ‘last resorts’ or ‘building up’ to something. Some people do it shamelessly, others create publishing houses to mitigate the ‘stigma’. I’ve been sent four books to examine as case-studies, each of which use completely different styles of self-publishing.

Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged , , , ,

Review Short: Derek Beaulieu’s Kern

I must admit: the first time I flipped through Kern and looked at the various swirling typographic entities, two thoughts jumped into my head; how similar the pages looked to work by Australian book artist Lyn Ashby, and the other was jealousy at how much vintage dry-transfer lettering (Letraset) Canadian poet Beaulieu obviously has access to.

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged , ,

Review Short: p76’s Cornelis Vleeskens Special Issue

The first indication that the contents of this special issue hovers in the Venn overlap of art and poetry lies in its ‘curation’, not ‘edit’. Spence’s project was to ‘sample from a mass of work … to (make) a small but intense window’ (p. 5), and he does this by being true to the materiality of Vleeskens’s visual output. The nostalgic production values of the journal itself – photocopied in black and white on A4 paper, stapled, and with no frilly bits – is a perfect match for Spence’s vision and Vleeskens’s visual practice, which was firmly embedded in the intersections of text and image.

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged , ,