World Printmakers: What is your workshop like? Please give us your personal description.
Clive Barstow: Open Bite is an access workshop within an educational context. The workshop allows access for artists and prints / publishes limited edition prints for Indigenous and international artists. It is located within the School of Visual Arts Print Studio in central Perth. Perth is a typical west coast city, laid back & surfy. Because of its isolation from the east coast of Australia, much of its influence comes from the west and north i.e.. Asia rim, Europe and USA.

What media do you work in?
Etching, collograph, drypoint, silkscreen, lithography, relief, photography, digital.

Are you public or private?
Public.

How many staff do you have currently?
Four.

Do you have other activities besides printmaking, such as classes, exhibits, etc?
We have short courses, projects, research, community workshops & exhibitions.

Are you print publishers, as well? Do you sell prints?
Open Bite editions and publishes work for local agents, who are responsible for the marketing and selling of the work.

How did your workshop originate? Tell us the story.
Open Bite started out as simply an access workshop for graduates who wanted to carry on printmaking. Relationships developed with local art agencies who introduced a number of prestigious indigenous artists to the studio to make prints for the first time. This developed a publishing stream which now funds the workshop.

If you had to start again, what would you do differently?
Better time management, the success was not expected so quickly. Because the workshop is run in conjunction with a teaching program, much of its activity is carried out either with classes running or at weekends in the case of editioning for artists. This puts great strain on technical staff and printers, so the future needs to be organized so that particular times and people are used to ease the strain. (No strain - no gain of course.)

How has the workshop evolved from the early days? Are you still doing the same things in the same way, or have you changed? In what way?
Things have not changed, just increased. The main thrust for us is still educational, so we make a point of involving students and artists in collaborative relationships. The commercial outcomes do not drive our thinking, but are seen as an extra.

Is your workshop unique or different from the others? In what way?
The educational context makes us different from the traditional publishing-only focus of most public workshops. Because our philosophy is primarily educational, anything that comes out of this in terms of commercial publishing is an extra for us. This makes us fundamentally different from both public and private workshops.

What is your method of working with artists?
This varies depending on their experience. All artists work free of commercial pressure, so many risks are taken in the early stages. Artists are mostly introduced to processes that are new to them rather than commercially viable.

Who are some of the artists with whom you've had the most successful (on all levels) collaboration?
Jimmy Pike, Peter Skipper, Mary Mclean (Indigenous) Hanne May Scheen, Chrissie Parrot (International)

Tell us a bit more about the most interesting ones: incidents, anecdotes...
The Jimmy Pike project included taking students and artists on bush camp along with portable presses etc. Time was spent making prints in very primitive conditions for one week. The second week saw the artists and printers proofing back in the studio under professional conditions. The result was eight editions of prints including lithographs, relief prints and etchings. Both students and artists gained from the community and collaborative nature of this and other projects.

Do you work with special papers? Tell us about them.
BFK Rives, Saunders, Fabriano, (intaglio / relief) Guarro (water based screen printing).

How do you feel about the current moment in printmaking? Are you optimistic or pessimistic? Why?
Optimistic here, due to the strengthening of its process base by the introduction of digital technology. This also updates its applied base and links again to industrial processes.

What do you think are the major issues the community of printmakers needs to address?
The difference between craft and art, amateur and professional practice.

Do you have norms for the editions done in your workshop? What are they? What do you consider the numerical limit for a true limited edition?
We print small editions and more images. i.e. 60 max.

What's the best thing about having a printmaking workshop? And the worst?
The best thing is that it brings together professional artists, students and agents under the one interest. The worst is the physical drudgery of editioning difficult plates. This sounds pretty Utopian and it actually is so far. We work on a very small scale compared to the Victorian Print Workshop in Melbourne or Northernm Editions in Darwin for instance. The small scale thing is what keeps it Utopian.

Regarding the marketplace, who buys limited edition fine-art prints?
In Australia, mainly collectors and private sales.

What do you think might be done to make art buyers more aware of the true limited-edition fine-art print?
Its financial viability as a cheaper alternative to the painting, plus its involvement with process.

What is your opinion of the current upsurge of digital fine-art prints?
Digital printmaking, and the electronic processes in general, are very important to printmaking. However, the flood of electronic prints is more indicative of screen culture than the traditions of printmaking. I think this will settle down over the next few years along with the techno-fetish that drives it.

Can the traditional hand-pulled print "coexist peacefully" with the digital print?
Yes, quality of image is more important to me than the technique.

What are your principal sources of information about the world of printmaking?
Internet.

How do you buy your supplies? Local suppliers? Mail order? Internet?
Local and national suppliers.

Whom do you consider the most relevant, best printmakers at work today?
The best prints for me are ones by non-printmakers such as painters and sculptors working with print workshops and master printers. (Dine, Stella etc) I think because sculptors, media artists, painters etc. approach printmaking from an external need rather than an infatuation with the processes. The problem with teaching process-based art is that you can accidentally instill such a devotion to the technique, that the ideas can get lost. There is a happy medium I think between ideas and techniques which for me is where the best prints are produced. At the highest level, this is where Raushenburg would work with Tamarind for instance, producing a result that is truly not print fetish nor a printed version of his paintings. Utopia again.

Where do you think printmaking will go in the next 10 years?
I think printmaking could split into two camps. One the craft based techno fetish arena which drives most local community workshops. The other the professional workshop that is involved in research & development and printing for artists. At a local or amateur level, it is often the process that locks the artist in. That is not to say that there is not room for this, but in my opinion this is one thing that separates craft from art. There is craft in all art I know, but once things are polarized through techno fetish, it can become amateur by the lack of conceptual balance. Here endeth my sermon.

Our thanks to Clive Barstow, Co-ordinator
Open Bite Australia
West Australian School of Visual Arts
Edith Cowan University
2 Bradford Street
Mount Lawley
West Australia 6050
Phone 08 9370 6239
Email c.barstow@cowan.edu.au