2007 Geelong acquisitive print awards

from w
I had to choose one item to write a poem or story for a forthcoming gig organized by Geelong Writers with the Gallery so I quickly sketched Anne-Maree Hunters' The tower of Babel 2006 made from cut-out cardboard and quite small 55 x 50 by 50 more or less. Scenes were painted on it such as an igloo, a grass hut, the Sydney Opera House and there were cut-outs like windows. Words - perhaps Biblical covered the inside of the carboard. The artist used screen-printing as her concession to the title of the award.

I decided maybe I could write about an eccentric elderly grandfather with a disorder that stops him leaving his seven storey tower which is filled with books, paintings and cats. Well, maybe. The mind boggles a bit at the suggestions of building a tower towards God, labyrinths, secret passages, locked doors and the current obsession with ego and towers.

My mind is clogged with hayfever and a kind of flu so it's too woolly to write anything yet. I liked John Ryrie's Aesop's lamp, a linocut and also Marco Luccio The Eiffel tower, but found the obsession with a kind of 19th century detail in some prints just too much. Not that I dislike 19th century engravings and lithographs. One based on Constance Cummings picture of the Kauvadra Mountains in Fiji I like, perhaps because of the subject matter and knowing that in those days they did not have an ease with making instant pictures like we do these days.