Print Portfolio

‘The portfolio is essentially a small but complete portable exhibition.’¹ – Jeremy Lewison

The Melbourne Now Print Portfolio comprises twelve new prints commissioned especially for the exhibition. Contributing one print each, established and emerging artists explored a range of techniques, with the diversity of work reflecting Melbourne’s dynamic and flourishing print community.

In contemporary practice, almost any process through which an image is transferred from one surface to another can be used to make a print. This multiformity is demonstrated in the portfolio, which includes relief prints created through hand-carving a block of linoleum; digitally produced prints constructed from photographs; graphic screenprints; and works exploring texture and colour through the centuries-old printmaking process of etching.

While many of the prints were produced solely by the artist, such as those made by Artek Halpern-Laurence and Sophie Westerman, others are the result of close collaboration with a specialist printer. Matthew Clarke produced his colour linocut with his long-term printer Glenn Morgan, while Stefan Wirihana Mau teamed up for the first time with printer Trent Walter of Negative Press. In another collaboration, Lama Lama artist Rubii Red (Ruby Kulla Kulla) worked with Sarah Murphy and Matt Feder (Troppo Print Studio) to create a screenprint highlighting printmaking’s close association with activism.

Some of the artists featured in the portfolio work across media and were drawn to printmaking because of its potential for experimentation: Aylsa McHugh extended her recent interest in collage by employing photogravure to juxtapose images of vintage hair models with modernist sculpture, and interdisciplinary artist Christine Johnson used digital colour printing in her work, inspired by Mallee botanist Eileen Ramsay (1887–1961). 

Other artists in the portfolio, such as Robert Hague and Deanna Hitti, interrogated history. In his hand-drawn lithograph, Hague referenced artworks and objects from the NGV Collection to question collecting practices and contemporary culture, while in her print Hitti used her signature cyanotype print process (named for its cyan-blue colour) to probe Western (mis)representations of the Middle East.

Published in an edition of fifteen, the Print Portfolio is a microcosm of the Melbourne Now exhibition itself: a unique constellation of visions and voices existing in multiple and portable form. These crucial attributes – multiplicity and portability – grant the portfolio the added qualities of accessibility, dissemination and (paradoxically) permanence. While the exhibition inevitably ends, the portfolio – a group of images made solely of ink and paper – lives on, framed and hung on living-room walls and stowed away in archival boxes for generations to come.

Jessica Cole, Assistant Curator, Prints and Drawings, NGV

1 Jeremy Lewison, ‘Projects and portfolios: narrative and structure’, 1995, reproduced in Ruth Pelzer-Montada (ed.), Perspectives on Contemporary Printmaking: Critical Writing Since 1986, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2018, p. 247.