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We have been collaborating since 1999, making artists’ books, zines, collages, stories, prints, and drawings. Besotted still, it appears, with paper for its adaptable, foldable, cut-able, concealable, revealing nature, using an armoury of play, the poetic and familiar too, with the intention of luring you into our A(rtists’ books) to Z(ines).
Based in Melbourne, Australia, visitors: Naarm, we work from home. Our collaboration is one based on harmony.
Yours in paper roll,
Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison -
Our work can be found in the collections of:
Art Gallery of Ballarat; Art Gallery of New South Wales; Artspace Mackay; Banyule City Council; Burnie Regional Art Gallery; City of Whitehorse; Charles Sturt University; Deakin University Library; Gladstone Regional Art Gallery; Gold Coast City Art Gallery; Latrobe Regional Gallery; Maroondah City Council; Melbourne Museum; Melbourne University Library; Merri-bek Art Collection; Monash University Library; Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery; National Gallery of Australia; National Gallery of Victoria; National Library of Australia; Print Council of Australia; RMIT University Library; Royal Perth Hospital; State Library of New South Wales; State Library Victoria; State Library of Queensland; University of Wollongong; Warrnambool Art Gallery; Tate (UK); University of the West of England (UK); Cynthia Sears Collection, Bainbridge Island Museum of Art (USA); Baylor University (USA); Environmental Design Library, Berkeley University of California (USA); Howard-Tilton Memorial Library (USA); North Dakota State University (USA); Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections, Ohio University (USA); ACA Library of Savannah College of Art & Design (USA); Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (USA); and private collections.
We decided early on in our collaboration, through an organic process, not to polish the same skills. We naturally lent towards different things and now bring those different things together to make work not possible without the other. Working this way, a third work is made that belongs to us both. A work that we now share with you.
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Our work has been commissioned by:
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To try to make change for the better
We make a monthly donation to The Nature Conservancy Australia to protect the habitat of the Northern quoll, and Seed, Australia’s first Indigenous youth climate network, for “a just and sustainable future with strong cultures and communities, powered by renewable energy”.
We make annual donations to Bush Heritage Australia and other local and international non-profit organisations. -
Because all things are connected
Alongside our work, as of 2024, we are Tiny but Wild, a licensed wildlife shelter based, like our studio, in our home in North Fitzroy.
After being foster carers for RSPCA Victoria, 2017–2021, and Grey-headed flying-fox carers for Bat Rescue Bayside, 2020–2023, this next step seemed inevitable.
Writing, too, about dance for Fjord Review (since 2012).
For us, above all, it is not the medium that is always of greatest import, but the message. And so, we use found imagery and acquired scenery in our artists’ books, collages, prints, and more recently animated collages and installations, alongside our own drawings, for what they can enable us to say, and what we hope you might in turn feel. Though, of course, what you feel is entirely up to you, and to this end we favour open endings above all.
From the intimate to the epic in scale, you can see in our work what you will. You can make of our comprised scenarios what you will. You can see fragments of your very own self. You can see your own link with nature. You can see human nature reflected in the movements of the characters. You can see charm, absolute. Along the way, some people have seen our zines to be artists’ books, or our ‘this’ to be ‘that’, and as this is something beyond our control, we’re fine with that. Like anything, the closer you look, the more you see.
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The remaking of things
Commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) for Melbourne Now.
Located on level two of The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, our large-scale collage was drawn from 100 works in the NGV Collection. The scene depicted a pocket of restored eucalyptus forest habitat, with cyclic sound and lighting design signalling gradual transitions from morning to night and back again.
On display from Friday 24th of March until Sunday 3rd of September, 2023. -
The remaking of things, artists' book
What if you could grow a forest from a collection. What if you could weave a floor to ceiling landscape from E. G. Adamson’s Snow coral (1930s–1940s) and Louisa Anne Meredith’s Study for gum-flowers and ‘love’ (c. 1860). Slide Tom Roberts’s She-oak and sunlight (1889) alongside Tom Humphrey’s Summer walk (c. 1888), and glimpse Grace Cossington-Smith’s Bottlebrushes (1935) through the foliage.
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Bracketed by light
In many ways, this artists’ book is because of, and for, six animals we recently fostered and are currently fostering, for their release back into the wild.
To those who require foraging resources and roosting sites.
To the ingenious ecological kindness of the pollinators and seed dispersers.
The echolocators catching insects on the wing. The leaf-consuming fuel-reducers. -
Bower
We were commissioned to create artwork for Genevieve Lacey’s Bower, “a project inspired by bowerbirds’ obsessive collecting habits, and their ability to build magical architecture out of fragments”.
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Something reverberated
There were once trees growing under the roads. There are still creeks flowing beneath the directional pathways we’ve imposed. Patches of green remain, here and there. Pieces of what was, though dimmer, diminished. A jigsaw forest that hints at what could have been, should have been, and echoes the sprung rhythm words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, “After-comers cannot guess the beauty been”.
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Genesis Baroque's 2024 season
We were commissioned to create artwork for Genesis Baroque’s four performances Concerti Grossi, Paris Quartets, Dresden Concerti, and Fête Champêtre.
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A Hemline of Sky, Forest, and Water Through Smoke
Because through action comes hope, we’ve created a series of artists’ books which require the reader to take action in order to see the full collage clearly.
The reader will need to tear open the perforated fore-edge of each page spread to see through the smoke, to see what lies beneath, or ahead, or in the past.
Echoing Sir David Attenborough’s words that “If we don’t take action, the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon”, without action, all will be lost. -
Through a glass eye
A body of etchings and lithographs, produced with APW Printers at Australian Print Workshop, Melbourne, as part of Australian Print Workshop’s French Connections project curated by APW Director Anne Virgo OAM.
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Ripples in the Open
An expanded collage commissioned especially for ArtSpace at Realm, in which we call upon our love of cinema and collecting.
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