It’s winter here in Melbourne, and if you know anything about winter and Melbourne and Australian literary culture, you’ll know that winter in Melbourne means the Emerging Writers’ Festival. One of the cool things we’ll be doing at EWF this year is our Riso Printshop Show: an art exhibition that is also an opportunity to get some of your own artwork printed and exhibited for free. It starts today, i.e. this very day, and it runs for the entire duration of the festival, with a spiffy opening party on the 20th of June, and it’s being held at 1000 £ Bend.
We’ve asked a bunch of our friends and longtime contributors to exhibit some Riso prints of their work. (Don’t even know what a Risograph print is? Read the Wikipedia page about it, you dingus!) These people include:
- Xanthe Dobbie
- Lee Lai
- Tommi PG
- Lynn Nguyen
- Sam Wallman
- Merv Heers
- Nicky Minus
- Caroline Anderson
- Michael Hawkins
- Hiro MCL
- Marc Pearson
- … and you, maybe?
Want to get involved? All you have to do is bring in an A4-sized monochrome print of your artwork and we’ll convert it into a spiffy Riso print in fluoro pink or purple ink right there and then. (Subject to paper and ink availability and the machine not breaking—if you really want that sexy Riso print, you should bring your artwork in early, and bring it in often.) We’ll keep one copy for hanging in the exhibition space and you get to keep nineteen copies for your own nefarious purposes.
If you’re keen: please don’t bring in a digital file on a USB or anything like that! Risograph machines don’t work like that, and we’ll have to tell you to go to the nearest newsagent and print off a copy, and it will be a bit embarrassing for everyone concerned.
If you don’t want to get a Riso print of your own artwork, drop in and check it out anyway! The exhibition will evolve over the course of the festival, and you’ll get to see some great work from Brow friends. What’s not to love?
The exhibition runs from 10am until 4pm every day of EWF, i.e. the 14th to the 24th of June, with the launch party happening on the 20th at 5:30 pm. It’s all happening at 1000 £ Bend, 361 Little Lonsdale St, Melbourne. Be there or be the kind of person who doesn’t have a bunch of free Riso prints of their own artwork!
Photographs of Riso prints in progress by TLB art editor Marc Pearson.