Imprint Magazine

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Imprint

Imprint is a quarterly paper dedicated to contemporary fine art printmaking – including works on paper, artists’ books, zines, digital and experimental print-related art – published by the Print Council of Australia.

With the Australian experience as our focus, we seek to engage in meaningful and diverse debate and analysis surrounding contemporary printmaking today within a broader fine art context.

Imprint aims to nurture the development of new and diverse voices in printmaking and arts writing alongside those more established in the field.…

Obituary: Dorothy Herel

A woman of unselfconscious elegance, impeccable taste and consummate style, Dorothy Herel, who died in Melbourne on June 11 this year, possessed a natural grace, warmth and an endearing lack of pretentiousness. Perhaps this latter quality can be attributed to a marvellous sense of humour and an entirely ‘grounded’, pragmatic and idiosyncratic way of being in the world – attributes which endeared her to her friends. Her laughter was infectious, her ‘eye’ infallible.

Mindful of both detail and ‘the big picture’, everything she laid her hands to – whether it was designing exquisite but bold garments for dance or exhibition, or fashioning individual garments and undertaking interior design work either commissioned or for herself and friends – she did with inventiveness, great practicality, accomplishment and perfection. And though she could chide one for some lapse in standards, we all knew her judgment was infallible. She acquired the status of an oracle: if one was in doubt it was to Dorothy we went for the final word.

Dorothy Catherine Herel (née Davis) was born in Melbourne in 1939. After a conventionally middle class childhood and adolescence, she studied Graphic Art and Design at Swinburne Institute of Technology, and, being something of a tear-away, encountered Melbourne’s Bohemian art world (including the Moras and the Heide circle). Seeking broader horizons than those of a largely white Anglo-Saxon Australian culture, like so many other talented young Australians in the late fifties and early sixties, she embarked for Europe at the age of twenty-one. Following a brief stint in London she travelled to Rome where she worked for two years before settling in Paris where she found work creating designs for tapestry weavers. Perhaps her life-long involvement with textiles found true inspiration there. Certainly her immersion in European life during this formative decade was seminal. France especially, with its cosmopolitanism, understated style and refined aesthetic cultivated those attributes in her; and, though she was to return to Australia with her Czech artist husband in 1973, she retained a very cultivated and European sensibility which resonated with that of her husband, the artist Petr Herel, whom she had met in Paris in 1970. French was their lingua franca– and has remained so within their family. Their marriage fostered a richly creative output from both of them.

Following the births in Melbourne of their daughters Sophie in 1974 and Emilie some sixteen months later, in 1976, the Herels returned to live in France. In Dijon, where Petr was teaching, they formed a strong friendship with Thierry Bouchard, a distinguished typographer and publisher of livres d’artiste , with whom Petr was later to form the Labyrinth Press. An offer to Petr to establish a department devoted to the production of artists’ books at the Canberra School of Art occasioned their permanent return to Australia in 1979. It was to prove the beginning of a highly creative evolution in Dorothy’s life. Working with the Canberra based dance companies, she designed costumes for the Human Veins Dance Theatre (Under the Skin, 1980, Illusions, and Maya, 1985) and then with the Meryl Tankard Company (Banshee, 1989).

Simultaneously, throughout the 1980s Dorothy Herel was also making exquisite and original clothing for many of her friends and for a number of public figures. While these much-acclaimed items existed in a realm between haute couture and nouvelle vague, her creativity found its most inventive expression in garments that transcend the boundaries between art and clothing. Collaborating with other Canberra-based textile artists and papermakers, in true European spirit, she made no distinction between the applied arts and so-called ‘pure art’.

Following numerous commissions for contemporary dance, often utilising moulded paper and sculptural in their articulation and adornment of the human body in motion, she was awarded an Australia Council Research Grant in 1991 to further explore papermaking in collaboration with the French papermaker Michel Guet. Working initially with typographer Thierry Bouchard in France, she produced a series of innovative and award winning ‘garments’ during the 1990s, beginning with the Text Vest – Jabberwocky, 1991, which was included in a number of both group and solo exhibitions in Adelaide, Melbourne and Canberra. This initiated an imaginative body of work utilising paper and printed text (including transposed ancestral writings), transparent and opaque fabrics, stitching and riveting – all of which embody elements that simultaneously evoke ritual and ceremonial garments and create a resonant poetic intimacy. In 1997, she wrote of this search: ‘On the one hand I am interested in the idea of a universal garment – the concept of a truly modern garment, utilitarian and detached from the futile pursuit of fashion and slavery to consumerism. On the other, I am concerned with the loss of ritual in the art of dressing which reflects the celebration of life and acknowledges the continuity of generations.’

Her work has been exhibited in the National Gallery of Australia and is held in a number of collections, both public and private, including the National Library, Canberra. She leaves a substantial and distinctive body of work behind. Equally she will be remembered for her loyalty to her friends, which was enduring, as was her thoughtfulness and generosity. Dorothy was an entirely original and endearing individual. We will remember the courage, dignity and singular grace with which she faced her approaching death. She leaves a big gap in our lives. She is survived by her husband of 44 years, the distinguished artist Petr Herel, their daughters, Sophie and Emilie, and their husbands, Markus and Steven, and three grandchildren, Amy, Samuel and Jana.…

Blue Mountains Art Gallery

How did you become interested in art and prints in particular?

I have always loved art – colour, texture, form, line, image – I like the way things fit together, or not. I am really drawn to contemporary art and this includes printmaking.

With regard to prints in particular I majored in printmaking at uni – I had done some in high school but it wasn’t until uni that I really got to understand the beauty of printmaking. I love the depths of black you can achieve with etching. The layering. The repetition. The textures. The image reversal. I particularly liked monotypes.

By the time I finished my undergrad I really wanted to work with other people’s art as much as make my own so I studied art administration and began working first at the Biennale of Sydney and then as Curator at Ivan Dougherty Gallery in Paddington. I continued to do my own art making and completed a Masters in Printmaking in 2004.

How do you view the role of curator?

For me a curator’s role is to bring out the best of an artwork, and in some cases an artist. Often as a curator I am solving problems – finding solutions to making an exhibition look the best it can. This isn’t so obvious with many exhibitions but with installations or other unique approaches to art there isn’t always an easy way to display the work.

I enjoy curating group shows and creating a conversation between works. I find it is the same creative energy that goes into curating as goes into art production. There is an urge to bring things together to illustrate a theme. It is also an intuitive process – it needs time and contemplation to get it right. It is easy to put a bunch of art in a gallery but to tell a good story with artworks is the challenge. The marker of exceptional art is the impact on the viewer – when I am physically affected or emotionally moved by a piece of art I feel compelled to include it in an exhibition.

What are some of the challenges you’ve faced while working as a curator?

The most challenging thing for me is working between the requirements of an institution and the vision of an individual artist. It’s like being an interpreter at times – making an artist’s vision possible within the constraints of budget, safety and time.

Can you tell us a bit about what a working day looks like for you?

My days can vary greatly depending on the stage of exhibition development. At the moment I curate three to four exhibitions per year and assist on installs for the other exhibitions in the gallery, so at any given time I will be dealing with all stages of development at once.

If I am curating a show then I work from a theme, I chose the artists and the works and then take the whole exhibition through to completion. In the early stages of exhibition development I might be out visiting artist studios and looking at lots of work. At other stages I will be doing a lot of administration: preparing loan agreements, sending emails, organising freight, discussing logistics. If it is an install week then I am in the gallery: painting walls, unpacking crates, condition reporting and physically hanging artworks. So you can see there is a lot of variety.

Who are your role models?

Victoria Lynn was an early role model in the 1990s. I interned with her at the Art Gallery of NSW where she was the Curator of Contemporary Art and I then travelled to Venice with her, Brenda Croft and Hetti Perkins to help with the installation of the exhibition fluent in the 1997 Venice Biennale. All three are amazing women and exceptional curators. I find I refer back to their exhibitions/styles/insights/sensibilities a lot when I am making curatorial decisions.

The other person who significantly influenced my career is Nick Waterlow. I first felt moved and excited by contemporary art when I saw his 1986 Biennale. I never thought I would end up working with him, but as it turned out I spent a significant amount of my career with him both at the Biennale of Sydney in 1999-2000 and then at Ivan Dougherty Gallery in 2000-2009 where he was Director. One thing in particular I learnt from him was how to see the good in an artwork that you might not personally like. He could see the point of what an artists was trying to say even if he didn’t care for the style. He could get to the essence of an artwork – see the artist’s thought process. He had a brilliant way with artists.

Often with a group show (not curated but a prize for example) the curator has no control over the content, and yet we have to install the exhibition and make it look wonderful. Nick was able to do this effortlessly by engaging with the intent of the artist and not being shy about placing bold works together. He taught me to tackle an exhibition head on, to deal with and appreciate the many different styles of art, not just my personal preferences.

Can you tell us a bit about the process of putting together Tracing the Line?

Curating Tracing the Line was lots of fun. It has been a journey through fifty years of Australian printmaking history. I discovered that the Print Council of Australia’s commissioned printsreflect and document the changing trends within print processes from the mid-1960s to date. The inclusion of photo etching and screenprints in the 1970s, heat transfer and colour copies in the 1980s through to the use of laser and inkjet printing in the 1990s and digital prints in the 2000s, finishing with a print on steel in 2015. The collection traces the development and progress of printmaking techniques across the five decades since its inception.…

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