One, two, three, ready
Melbourne Art Book Fair 2020
Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison
A Hemline of Sky Through Smoke
A Hemline of Forest Through Smoke
and
A Hemline of Water Through Smoke
2020
Unopened artists’ books, 12 double-sided Indigo Digital CMYK pages with perforated fore-edge and 8 double-sided Indigo Digital CMYK and black pages on 118gsm Mohawk Superfine Smooth Ultra White, with Indigo Digital CMYK covers on 148gsm Mohawk Superfine Smooth Ultra White.
Including a waistband on 118gsm Mohawk Superfine Smooth Ultra White, and paper knife on 1400gsm boxboard.
Printed by Bambra
Bound by the artists
(Each an) edition of 100, with 10 artists’ proofs
Four trips, in and out of the north entrance mouse hole, and we are done. Set up and ready, in the morning-vacuum quiet of the Great Hall. Ready to share A Hemline of Sky, Forest, and Water Through Smoke with you at this year’s NGV Melbourne Art Book Fair. Thank-you for your pre-orders and interest in this work.
Because through action comes hope, we created this series of artists’ books. Books which the reader needs to take action with in order to see the full collage clearly. The reader will need to tear open the perforated fore-edge of each page spread to see through the smoke, to see what lies beneath, or ahead, or in the past.
Echoing Sir David Attenborough’s words that “If we don’t take action, the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon”[i], without action, all will be lost.
The hemline of smoke is both a representation of bushfire smoke caused by the megafires of the last four months, and a reference to the disappearance of our natural world due to land clearing, species extinctions, and the climate change emergency.
From the critically endangered Swift parrot (Lathamus discolor) to the vulnerable Long-nosed potoroo (Potorous tridactylus), and with Australia’s woeful conservation track record[ii], all of the species within these pages were once common, where they were observed and drawn.
Within the pages, through the smoke, you can see stage sets by Eugène Cicéri (1813–1890), from The Elisha Whittelsey Collection in The Metropolitan Museum of Art; and from the digital archives of State Library Victoria and National Library of Australia, Australian birds from the Port Phillip District of NSW, from the sketchbook of John Cotton, and illustrations by Harriett Scott and Helena Forde from The Mammals of Australia (Sydney: Government Printer, 1871)[iii].
Featured within the 300+ digital layers, engravings by James Sowerby from Zoology and botany of New Holland and the isles adjacent (London: J. Sowerby, 1794); and Sarah Stone from Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales: With Sixty-five Plates of Non Descript Animals, Birds, Lizards, Serpents, Curious Cones of Trees and Other Natural Productions (London: J. Debrett, 1790); alongside those accessed via the digital collections of Biodiversity Heritage Library and the Rijksmuseum. These early European depictions of Australian natural history are common to our own memory bank. These hand-coloured observations of our trespass, a reflection about history and memory — from where we have come, where we now are, and where we are headed — as descendants of the colonisers.
We will be donating 5% of each sale to Bush Heritage Australia, to help protect that which inspired the work. Bush Heritage Australia is an “independent not-for-profit that buys and manages land, and also partners with Aboriginal people, to conserve our magnificent landscapes and our irreplaceable native species forever” (Bush Heritage Australia).
NGV Melbourne Art Book Fair
Great Hall, NGV International
180 St Kilda Road, Melbourne
Thursday 12th March
6–9pm opening event (Melbourne Design Week)
Friday 13th March
10am–5pm
6–10pm (as part of NGV Friday Nights)
Saturday 14th March
10am–5pm
Sunday 15th March
10am–5pm
Available as a set, with waistband and paper knife
A Hemline of Sky, Forest, and Water Through Smoke
Available individually
A Hemline of Sky Through Smoke
A Hemline of Forest Through Smoke
A Hemline of Water Through Smoke
(Editions 1–75 sold as sets; editions 76–100 sold individually)
[i] David Wallace-Wells, ‘Time to Panic: The planet is getting warmer in catastrophic ways. And fear may be the only thing that saves us’, The New York Times, 16th February 2019, accessed December 2019
[ii] Chief Climate Councillor, Professor Tim Flannery, ‘New Report: Unique Aussie wildlife threatened by climate change’, Climate Council, 17th September 2019, accessed December 2019
[iii] Other animals featured within include a Grey-headed flying fox; a Bare-nosed wombat; a pair of Koalas (listed as ‘The Native Bear’); Common brushtail possums (listed as ‘The Common Opposum’ and ‘The Sooty Opossum’); a Greater glider (listed as a ‘Black Flying Opossum’); Eastern quolls (listed as ‘The Native Cat’ in the original, and now with a conservation status of Near Threatened) and Spotted-tailed quolls (listed as a ‘Martin Cat’); a Kookaburra (listed as ‘Great brown kings fisher’); a Crimsonband Wrasse (listed as a ‘Cyprinaceous Labrus’); a Brush-tailed phascogale (listed as ‘A Tapoa Tafa’, with a conservation status of Vulnerable); a Rainbow lorikeet (listed as ‘Blue-bellied parrot’); an Eastern blue-tongue (listed as a ‘Skinc-formed Lizard’); a Jacky dragon (listed as a ‘Muricated Lizard’); a Grey heron; a pair of Crested shrike-tits; and a wonky Eastern grey kangaroo.
Image credit: Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison, A Hemline of Water through Smoke (detail), 2020
