Rumpelstiltskin and the Serpent Queen
As well as being a storehouse of archaic presses and type, the museum was a repository of discarded library books, mostly from the Soviet era when over-enthusiastic publication runs far exceeded modest demand. There were pallets of books in every available corner, the literal literary landscape of my daily passage to the studio. The museum recycled the books in various creative ways but barely made a dint in their stockpile. The local encyclopaedias that were doomed to redundance with the fall of the Soviet Union and now sat in piles around the museum had especially fabulous illustrations.
As it happens, I’d been making artist books just prior to the Tartu residency. Bookbinding had been an early love of mine, parked on the shelf during the PhD, but I had to rapidly upskill when I suddenly found myself teaching the Artist Books elective at RMIT University. In the scramble to teach myself a semester’s worth of binding techniques and provide meaningful examples ahead of class, I began to think laterally about generating content from what I had on hand. Clearly, reduction linocuts were not an option. Luckily, the bills that arrived all too regularly in our letterbox came in envelopes with a range of patterned interiors, supplying a steady source of pre-printed matter that I could convert into the pages of my books.
I also had a single volume of a vintage German encyclopaedia, with terrific black-and-white imagery, that had been discarded and literally left to moulder. The illustrations, isolated as they were from backgrounds, lent themselves to novel amalgamations through collage. I began to consider how I might construct novel narratives from the abstract patterns of the envelopes and the retro illustrations, responding to the found imagery and allowing this to dictate content.
I found myself enjoying this more responsive method of working, of uncovering the potential in the overlooked and the discarded and bestowing a new worth through careful craft – of spinning gold from straw. Even receiving bills took on a silver lining.
This Rumpelstiltskin-esque consideration of ‘base’ materials was not new but rather the lifelong legacy of resourcefulness that I inherited as the daughter and granddaughter of Lithuanian refugees who fled Soviet occupation in the wake of WWII, forced to start their lives anew from scratch in Australia. My childhood was one of op-shop finds and mended hand-me-downs, restored junk-shop furniture, preserved fruits in re-used jars and composting. The ‘waste not, want not’ credo became even more entrenched during my long years fulfilling the cliché of penniless student and ever-emerging artist.
It was also becoming harder to ignore the mountain ranges of rubbish and floating continents of plastic – the overabundance of stuff – that was reshaping the globe. It occurred to me that, by creating reduction linocuts which chewed through ink and required full editions to be printed regardless of whether there was a market for them, I was contributing to this surplus of stuff.
The piles of discarded books in Tartu felt like a personal taunt on my daily pilgrimage to the printmaking studio. As the residency drew to a close, it seemed I might finish my Kongla Ann portrait with time to spare. A window opened up for me to indulge my inner Rumpelstiltskin, and I was more than ready to jump through it.
My final fortnight in Tartu was spent in a frenzy of searching, cutting, composing and pasting amid a flurry of discarded paper scraps, culminating in The Slippery She-Wolf Dreams in Snakish. This eighteen-page circle concertina book included every image of a wolf I could find and encapsulated the female werewolf lore I had uncovered over the course of the residency, fused with arcane motifs from another of Kivirähk’s novels, The Man Who Spoke Snakish (which has been translated into English). My artist book felt like a more fitting culmination of my time in Tartu than the Kongla Ann portrait, planting the seed for an even deeper immersion into Lithuania’s own folkloric traditions, and setting loose a snake amongst the werewolves.
