We have been collaborating for over twenty years (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).
For us, above all, it is not the medium that is always of greatest import, but the message. And so, we use found photographs, collected postcards and acquired scenery in our A to Z 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.
Jim Pavlidis, Gracia and Louise, 2021, oil on masonite, 55.5cm X 71.5cm
Upon last count, we have created 108 artists’ book titles, and released 147 zine titles.
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.
Our work has been commissioned by Ace Hotel; The Australian Ballet; Australian Poetry; The Big Issue; Fjord Review; Genesis Baroque; Genevieve Lacey; Maroondah City Council; Melbourne Chamber Orchestra; Melbourne City of Literature; National Gallery of Victoria; State Library Victoria; and The World of Interiors.
Based in Melbourne, visitors: Naarm, we work from home. Our collaboration is one based on harmony.
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.
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), an international online and print review of ballet and dance, edited by Penelope Ford.
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.
Yours in paper covered,
Gracia & Louise
(Photographs featured throughout the site of our artists’ book set, A Hemline of Sky, Forest, and Water Through Smoke (2020), Something reverberated (2021), and Bracketed by light (2022), are by Tim Gresham.)
Tiny but Wild
To try to make change for the better, we are Tiny but Wild, a wildlife shelter. We care for Grey-headed flying foxes and ringtails, for the main, assorted microbats, and other surprises, like Bingo, the Dusky antechinus, and Peanut, the Bush rat, along the way; all wild and glorious creatures we can care for in our tiny setup with a view to release.
We make a monthly donations to SEED, Australia’s first Indigenous youth climate network; Animals Asia; and The Nature Conservancy Australia to protect the habitat of the Northern quoll.
Adopt an acre today. Do what you can.
Photo: Northern quoll (Dasyurus hallucatus) Prince Regent River, WA Australia © Bruce Thomson/Auswildife
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