LETTERPRESS & COLOUR

Clint Harvey & Caren Florance will guide participants through the process of working with colour and the letterpress process of building type forms and understanding registration. Working with transparent and opaque letterpress inks on both paper and fabric. The workshop will conclude with printing a T-Shirt print on one of the collection’s most valuable items, the F.T Wimble iron hand press.

Bring Your Own T-Shirt! 

There are many sides to Clint Harvey: a designer, an educator, a curator and a dreamer. He embraces each persona with the same enthusiasm and commitment. After running his own agency, Clint now finds himself back in his old neighbourhood in the Valley at the helm of Design College Australia. This may not be an unusual path for an experienced designer to take but not many can also boast founding a museum.

At DCA he works tirelessly to share his passion, knowledge and skill with the emerging generation of designers, photographers and letterpress enthusiasts. Clint can be found lecturing in any the school’s disciplines from teaching a photography class studio lighting to explaining the challenges of packaging to graphics students and sharing keyboard short cuts in Adobe Illustrator.

Always a lover of typography, it was while visiting the Hamilton Wood Type Museum in the United States that Clint’s passion was taken to new heights with letterpress. He was inspired to arm himself with as much knowledge as he could about Australasian typographic and print history. He began filling a spare classroom of his college with presses, font collections, type drawers, rare books and type specimens. The Bacon Factory was born.

This dreamer is not stopping with one school and one museum. Motions are in place to establish a number of working letterpress studios across Australia and New Zealand. The future of letterpress in this corner of the world seems to be in safe hands.

Caren Florance works creatively with text and print in many different ways, but books remain close to her heart.

Dissatisfied with traditional publishing relationships, her PhD at the University of Canberra (2013-18) explored collaborative experiments with poets and poetics using a range of analogue and digital print processes. 

Caren’s teaching expertise is sited in book arts, text art and typography, visual poetry (vispo), and graphic design. She teaches her students to use the book form to augment their practice, not dominate it.

She works predominantly with relief printmaking, both press-based and hand-printed. Other forms of mark-making find its way into her work, particularly via revisitings of old technologies. Digital processes are increasingly of interest.

Ampersand Duck is an umbrella for many activities. It sometimes publishes in partnership with Recent Work Press.

Caren is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research (CCCR) at the University of Canberra.