Tea, cakes and cultural ephemera!

Please join us in the John Paynter Gallery on Sunday 19th June, from 10am until 4pm, for  a day of performance, demonstrations, artist, writer and curators' talk, and most importantly, cake!

Just click on the 'what's on' tab of this blog for more information about what's happening. Entry to the event is via gold coin donation to our host the Lock Up (90 Hunter Street, Newcastle).

And please remember that for the duration of our exhibition at the John Paynter Gallery, 10-26th June, Sprocket Roasters is offering a 15% discount to all exhibition patrons. All you need to do to claim your discount is utter the magic phrases 'Happily Ever After' or 'Once upon a time'.

Sprocket is our sponsor!

As avid consumers of caffeine, Happily Ever After is proud to announce Sprocket Roasters as our sponsor. Sprocket is a cool little café at 68 Hunter Street Newcastle (just along from our home at the John Paynter Gallery) with a great rep for doing some of the best hot beverages around.

Sprocket have kindly offered Happily Ever After exhibition patrons a 15% discount on all food and beverage for the duration of the John Paynter Gallery exhibition (10-26 June). All you need to do is rock up to one of their friendly staff with an exhibition invitation, utter the magic phrase ‘Once upon a time’, and the discount will be yours!

Here’s some more info on Sprocket’s mighty brew:

‘Chemical engineering, conservation, carbon-neutral technology and... coffee? Our aim at Sprocket Roasters is to mix creativity with sound scientific principles, bringing you the best beans roasted in the most sustainable way. Our mad scientist has patented a technological breakthrough that enables our fluid bed roaster to run on biofuels and café waste, making it one of the most environmentally-friendly roasters this side of the moon. We are confident this see-it-and-taste-it-to-believe-it roasting experience will have you coming back cup after cup…

Forged in the industrial heart of Newcastle, Sprocket Roasters’ award winning coffee is brought to you by a rogue collective – engineers, farmers, lawyers, teachers, winemakers and yoga instructors – who have quit our day jobs as we have a consuming passion for all things coffee.

Whether you need it to warm you up after a surf, keep you awake on the dogwatch or maybe just sip in your backyard in your underwear, we’ve got a blend that’s right for you.

Step out into this big wild world with a cuppa Sprocket in the morning... because our roasting process has your carbon footprints covered. ’Njoy!!’

Fairy Tale expert to open exhibition

Happily Ever After is pleased to announce that Dr Caroline Webb, an academic at the University of Newcastle, will formally open the exhibition on midday Saturday 11^th June. Caroline Webb studies and teaches English literature since 1900, focusing on Modernism and on contemporary fiction, especially fantastic fiction.  She is particularly interested in how recent British women writers have rewritten fairy tales to think about the female life: her publications include discussion of A.S. Byatt's "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye" (Hecate 29, 2003), Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber" (in Literature and Sensation, Cambridge Scholars 2009) and Jeanette Winterson's "Story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses" (in Postmodern Reinterpretations of Fairy Tales, Lampeter 2011).  She is currently serving as Secretary of the Australasian Children's Association for Research and is working on a critical book on British fantasy literature.

Carmel Bird and Cape Grimm

Happily Ever After is incredibly proud to announce that Carmel Bird will be participating in our exhibition. Carmel has kindly allowed us to use two extracts from the brilliant Cape Grimm (the extracts being the fictional letter that forms the prologue to the novel, and the section that begins on page 226 with 'It was three weeks before...' and ends on page 227 with 'Caleb had been taken by the squid'). Exhibition participants, artists and writers, are asked to create a single image or text in response to one or both of these extracts. Happily Ever After plans to designate a 'Carmel Bird Corner' in the gallery to display the results. Please get in touch if you'd like to participate!

Funding and touring

We're thrilled to announce that Happily Ever After is the recipient of a NAVA marketing grant. This means that instead of an operating budget of practically nil, we have funding to promote the exhibition. Huzzah! We have booked advertisements in Peppermint magazine, Imprint magazine (Print Council of Australia) and the Australian Book Arts Journal, with more to follow. Thank you so much to the good people at NAVA.

Today we confirmed that after the exhibition at John Paynter Gallery in Newcastle, Happily Ever After will travel to Artspace Mackay, another fantastic venue and one with a great tradition of supporting this genre. Exhibition dates at Mackay are 22nd July-28 October, more details to follow.

Social media, proposals and publicity

We’ve received some exquisite proposals for the open section of Happily Ever After, and with the closing date of the open section fast approaching, we’re expecting some great ideas from this section too. Some highlights include:

• Cousins Linda Swinfield (visual artist) and Susan Hampton (writer) are collaborating on a story about the three furies, goddesses of vengeance in the underworld, who decide to take a holiday and end up staying in a Sydney youth hostel instead. Surf, sun, backpackers and… lethal women.
   
• Despite the fact that they have never met, and live on opposite sides of the globe, Newcastle’s Tallulah Cunningham (wildlife illustrator and fantasy artist) and London based writer Rick Kellum are working together to create illuminated manuscripts of his short story Aiken and the Dream Islands.
  
• Susan and Michael Hall-Thompson are busily creating a modern day fairytale that uses the Mills and Boon novel as its starting point. (Have you heard the joke about M and B creating a new verb? It’s ‘to hard’ as in ‘she felt him hard against her). ‘There is a Mills and Boon novel sold every 6.6 seconds’ writes Susan, adding that the images would subvert the romance genre by showing ‘women caught in the everyday’. 
  
•  In the 1980s Monica Oppen ‘completed a book which was the diary of Cinderella, but it was a prequel of the Brothers Grimm story’.  Challenging both the linear perspective of traditional fairy tales, and the effortless finality of the phrase ‘happily ever after’, Monica is now writing a sequel and also a much later diary. We can’t wait to read them!
  
• Working with Hans Christian Anderson’s Red Shoes, Angela Gardner is contemplating an altered book that plays with notions of discipline and punishment, ‘a visual representation of destructive, all consuming desire’.

While the proposals mentioned are all narrative based, a number of proposals contain more oblique references to the genre, or rely on a purely visual interpretation. We’ve received one proposal for a sound based work and a number of works will be sculptural or installation based. 

Thank you all: we’ve loved reading the proposals and look forward to seeing the books!

To keep in touch, we're setting up a page on Facebook (details to follow). When it's up and running, please feel free to ‘like’ or ‘share’ our page, post images, suggest links or references, leave comments or send us material for either the Facebook page or the blog. Caelli and I recognise that being an artist or a writer can sometimes be an ‘isolated and eccentric’ pursuit so we’re keen to use social media to share the story of everyone’s creative process, and on a practical level, to promote the exhibition. 

To date, we have confirmed the participation of the following artists, bookmakers and writers: Lezlie Tilley, Deborah Williams, Emma Van Leest, Patricia Wilson-Adams, Monica Oppen, Angela Gardner, Caelli Jo Booker David Hampton, Helen Hopcroft, Pamela Poulson, Karen Robinson Smith, Rick Kellum, Tallulah Cunningham, Pamela See, Donna Townend, Tony Flowers, Amanda Watson-Will, Samara McIlroy, Gillean Shaw, Lisa Pullen, Nicola Hodder,  Linda Swinfield, Susan Hampton, Yvette Sullivan, Anne-Maree Hunter, Kris Williamson, Emily Hitchcock, Alison Smith, Wayne Thompson, Sarah Mould, Grant Hunter, Graham Wilson, Ileana Clarke, Gianna Fallavollita, Taryn Raffan, Breony Delforce, Eleanor Jane Robinson, Stephanie Kaul, Mandy Robinson, Don Brooker, Vanessa Bowden, Jillian Coulton and Anne Godfrey.

On the runway, preparing for take off

One of the interesting things about planning anything is the way the project can quickly gain its own momentum, and head off in a direction that while not completely unexpected, wasn’t what you had anticipated when you started off.  And so it is with Happily Ever After (HEA)…

In the beginning, Caelli and I had thoughts of a small but beautifully executed exhibition of artists’ books, displayed tastefully in pristine glass cases in a white gallery space, everything feeling rather cool, remote and museum-esque. I don’t quite know what happened to that idea. Somewhere along the way we remembered that we loved books, we loved reading and handling them, and that other people would probably like this too. We started talking about spaces designed to help people enjoy books: good coffee shops, libraries, old fashioned reading rooms with leather wing backed chairs and open fires, the bookshelves in second hand booksellers, comfy chairs, seedy sofas and coffee machines.

Caelli got out her black pen and magic marker and started drawing up an entirely different way of exhibiting artists’ books. Basically it’s a mix of the pristine and the accessible: books in glass cases and books on bookshelves, with plenty of comfortable spots to sit down and enjoy them, everything painted white so it’s like a cross between a contemporary art gallery and a library. We’re still discussing whether we can get a decent coffee machine into the gallery. The idea is to get people to not just walk around, look at things and leave, but to sit down and actively engage with what the artists and writers have created.

The organization of the show began to follow this visual plan. We decided to split the show into two sections: an invitation only section and an open section. Basically the division corresponds to the way we’re going to display the books. The invite only section books will mainly be in display cases, while the open section books will be placed in an accessible library section and rotated through a display case. We’re planning to scan and project images from all books onto one of the gallery walls. So far we’ve sent out about forty invitations to the former section, and once we’ve confirmed acceptances we’ll send out an open call for books to the latter section. 

So far we’re delighted to confirm the participation of a growing list of artists, bookmakers and writers including: Deborah Williams, Emma Van Leest, Tony Flowers, Patricia Wilson-Adams, Monica Oppen, Pamela See, Rick Kellum (UK), Nicola Cutter (US), Yvette Sullivan (UK), Karen Robinson Smith, Annemaree Hunter, David Hampton, Samara McIlroy, Donna Townend, Pam Poulson…